WE were to need all the fulness of consolation that could be expressed
from divine grace and human friendships, in the years immediately
succeeding the events recorded in the last chapter.
The Muse of American History has set a bloody and fire-blackened cross
against 1861. To us, it was darkened, through three-quarters of its
weary length, by the shadows of graves. One death after another among
the friends to whom we clung the more gratefully, because of the
gulf—fast filling with blood—that parted us from kindred and early
companions, followed our home-coming. In the last week of August, my
husband recorded, in his pastor’s notebook, that he had stood, in
fourteen weeks, at the open graves of as many parishioners, among them
some who had been most forward in welcoming him to his new field, and
most faithful in their support of him in it.
“It is literally walking in the valley of the shadow of death!” he
sighed, closing the melancholy pages. “I ask myself tremblingly, after
each funeral—Who next?”
At noon on September second—the fifth anniversary of our
wedding-day—our boy came home from a drive with his father, feverish
and drowsy, and fell asleep in my arms. On the fourteenth of the same
month, he was folded in an embrace, yet more fond and safe, beyond the
touch of mortal sorrow.
My bonnie, bonnie boy! who had never had a day’s illness until he was
stricken by that from which there was no recovery! Diphtheria was
comparatively new at that time, even to the able physician who was our
devoted personal friend. The boy faded before it, as a lily in drought.
Four days before he left us, his baby sister was smitten by the same
disease. Two days after the funeral, their father fell ill with it. Why
neither Alice, I, nor the faithful nurse who assisted us in the care
of the three patients, did not take the infection is a mystery. There
were no quarantine regulations to prevent the spread of what is now
recognized as one of the most virulent of epidemics. We took absolutely
no precautions; friends flocked to us as freely as if there were no
danger. Our fearlessness may have been a catholicon. We nursed the
sufferers back to health, and, looking to God for strength, took our
places again in the ranks.
Such a trite, every-day story as it is! To the soul for which the task
is set, it is as novel and crucial as death itself. It is not the young
mother who finds comfort and tonic in the inspired assurance:
“For while we bear it, we can bear;
Past that—we lay it down!”
For four months, we had not a letter from Richmond. The cordon was
drawn closely about the chief seat of the Rebellion—now the capital
of the Confederacy. It was hard to smuggle private letters through
the lines. We wrote by every possible opportunity, and were certain
that my family were as watchful of chances, likely and improbable.
At Christmas, we had a packet that had been run through by way of
Kentucky, by a man who wrote to say that he had been ill in a Richmond
hospital and received great kindness from my mother. When he was well
enough to rejoin his regiment, he had offered to get her letters to
me, if it were in the power of man to do it. His plan, he said, was to
entrust the parcel to a trusty negro, who would swim the Ohio River
on horseback at a point where the stream was narrow, and post letters
on the other side. If I should receive them, I might know that he had
fulfilled his pledge to my mother. If I did not get them, I would never
know how hard he had tried to keep his word.
I have often wondered if he received the answers we dispatched to the
post-office from which our precious letters were mailed. I never heard
from him again.
Home-bulletins brought the news of the death of my stern old
grandmother at the advanced age of eighty-four. She had never given
her sanction to the war, disapproving of military operations with the
whole might of her rugged nature. On a certain Sunday in June, news
was brought by fast express, while the people were in church, that the
war-vessel _Pawnee_ was on its way up the river to bombard the town.
Owing to the old lady’s deafness, she did not fully comprehend why the
services were closed summarily, and the streets were too full of people
hurrying to and fro, for my father to explain the state of affairs on
the way home. On the front steps they met my brother Horace in the
uniform of the Richmond Howitzers, to which he belonged. They had been
ordered summarily to repair to the point from which the expected attack
was to be repelled. A few hasty sentences put her into possession of
leading facts; the boy kissed her; shook hands with his father, and ran
down the street.
The old Massachusetts dame, whose father and husband had fought in the
Revolutionary War, stood still and looked after him until he was out of
sight.
He was her favorite of the boys—we fancied because he resembled the
Edwin she had wished to adopt, and who died in her arms.
The lad she followed with puzzled and griefful eyes was of a goodly
presence, and never goodlier than in his uniform. Did she bethink
herself of the probability that she might never see him again? What
she thought, and what she felt, will never be known. When my father
addressed her, she gazed at him with uncomprehending eyes, turned, and
walked feebly up the stairs.
“I am afraid mother is not well,” said my father to my mother, after
they had talked a few minutes of the alarm and Horace’s departure. “She
looked shaken by the boy’s going. Will you go up and look after her?”
She had undressed and gone to bed. She had taken her seat in church
that morning, a fine-looking dame of the old school; erect and strong;
alert of wits and firm of purpose. My mother looked into the face of
a shrunken, dull-eyed crone, who asked, in quavering accents, “Who
she was, and what was her business?” Then she began to moan and beg
to be taken “home.” That was her cry, whenever she spoke at all, all
summer long. But once did she quit her bed. That was when the nurse
left her, as they supposed, sleeping, and discovered her half an hour
later, fumbling at the lock of the front door, and in her nightgown.
She “wanted to go home! she would go home!” She went on September 5th,
while we, hundreds of miles away, were watching over our sick boy.
“The war killed off most of our old people,” said an ex-Confederate
officer once to me. “Almost as many died of sheer brokenheartedness,
as on the battle-field! _That’s_ an account somebody has got to settle
some day, if there is any justice in heaven.”
In the autumn of 1862, the state of my sister Alice’s health demanded
a change of climate so imperatively that we had no option in the
consideration of the emergency. Her throat was seriously affected;
she had not spoken above a whisper for six months. To keep her in
Newark for another winter was not to be thought of. Our parents were
writing by every available flag of truce strenuous orders that she
should “come home.” In early October, Mr. Terhune took her down to an
obscure village in Maryland directly upon Chesapeake Bay. It was, in
fact, a smuggling-station, from which merchandise of various sorts was
ferried into Virginia, in direct violation of embargo laws. Southern
sympathizers, whom loyalists were beginning to brand as “Copperheads”—a
name that stuck fast to them throughout the war—ran the enterprise and
profited by it. Through one of these, information sifted to us of which
we made use. When necessity drives, it will not do to be fastidious as
to instruments that will save us.
At dead of night my young sister was put into a boat, warmly wrapped
from the river-fogs, and, in charge of a Richmond gentleman who was
returning home, sent across the unlicensed ferry. Her father awaited
her on the other shore. A mile above and a mile below, lurid gleams,
like the eyes of river-monsters watching for their prey, showed where
United States gunboats lay in mid-stream to intercept unlawful commerce
and to arrest offenders. My husband did not impart to me the details
of the adventure until we had heard of the child’s restoration to
her father’s arms. Then he told of the fearful anxiety with which
he waited on the Maryland shore, under starless skies, scanning the
menacing lights up and down the river, and straining his ears for the
ripple against the sides of the boat making its way, cautiously, with
muffled oars, across the watery track. To deflect from the viewless
course would be to awaken the sleeping dogs of war. The lonely watcher
feared every minute to see from either of the gunboats a flash of fire,
followed by the boom of a cannon, signalling the discovery of the
attempt to evade the embargo.
“The dreariest vigil imaginable!” he said. “I stayed there for two
hours, until I was sure the boat must have made the landing. Had it
been intercepted, I should have seen some change in the position of
those red eyes and heard a shot.”
Before she embarked he had given the fugitive a self-addressed envelope
enclosing a card, on which was written: “Arrived safely.” She pencilled
below—“Alice,” and sent it back by the boatman. It was a week old when
he got it, and creased and soiled by much handling.
Then fell silence, that was felt every waking hour, and lasted for four
long months. On the first day of February, my husband being absent from
home, I walked down to the city post-office with Mrs. Greenleaf, my
eldest sister-in-law, who was visiting us, and took from our box a thin
letter addressed in my mother’s hand, and stamped “FLAG OF TRUCE.”
It was but one page in length. Flag-of-truce communications were
limited to that. The first line branded itself upon my brain:
“_I have written to you several times since our precious
Alice’s death!_”
She had rallied finely in her native air, and was, apparently, on
the highroad to health when smallpox broke out in Richmond military
hospitals. It spread to the citizens. The town was crowded, and
quarantine laws were lax. Dr. Haxall called and insisted that the
entire family be re-vaccinated. He had his way with all save one. Alice
put him off with a jest, and my mother bade him “call again, when she
may be more reasonable.” I fancy none of them put much faith in the
honest physician’s assertion that the precautionary measure was a
necessity. In those days a “good vaccination scar” was supposed to last
a lifetime. My sister fell ill a fortnight afterward, and the seizure
was pronounced to be “varioloid.”
A girl’s wilful whim! A mother’s indulgence! These may, or may not,
have been the opening acts of the tragedy. God knows!
Alice was in her twenty-second year, and in mind the most brilliant
of the family. She was an ardent student for learning’s sake, and an
accomplished English scholar; wrote and spoke French fluently, and
was proficient in the Latin classics. The one sketch from her pen
ever published appeared in _The Southern Literary Messenger_ while
she was ill. It proved what we had known already, that her talent for
composition was of a high order. Had she lived, the reading world would
have ratified our judgment.
On March 7th of that dark and bloody year, the low tide of hope
with the nation, our home was brightened by the birth of a second
daughter—our first brunette bairnie. Her brother and sister had the
Terhune blue eyes and sunny hair. She came on a wild, snowy day, and
brought such wealth of balm and blessing with her as seldom endows
parents and home by reason of a single birth. From the hour of her
advent, Baby Alice was her father’s idol. Why, we could not say then.
The fact—amusing at times—always patent—of the peculiar tenderness
binding together the hearts of the father and the girl-child—remained,
and was gradually accepted, without comment, by us all.
It was an unspeakable comfort to be able once more to talk of “the
children.” One never divines the depth of sweetness and significance
in the term until one has been robbed of the right to use it, through
months of missing what has been.
Other, if minor, distractions from personal sorrow and public
solicitudes were not wanting that year. I had been drawn into
charitable organizations born of the times. Our noble church was
forward in co-operation with municipal and State authorities in
relieving the distress of the thousands who were reduced to poverty by
the loss of the Southern trade and the stagnation of home industries.
Prices went up, and wages went down; soldiers’ widows and orphans must
be cared for; the soldiers in camps and hospitals were but ill-provided
with the comforts they had a right to expect from the government and
their fellow-citizens. We had Soldiers’ Relief Societies, and Auxiliary
Societies to the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, and by-and-by,
as the monetary situation told fiercely upon the women and children
of unemployed operatives, associations that supplied their wives with
sewing.
But for active participation in each of these benevolent organizations,
I do not see how I could have kept my reason while the fratricidal
conflict gathered force and heat.
My situation was peculiar, and, among my daily associates, unique.
Loving the Union with a passion of patriotism inconceivable by those
who have never had what they call by that name put to such test of
rack and flame as the martyrs of old endured, I yet had no personal
interest in one soldier who fought for the Cause as dear to me as life
itself. My prayers and hopes went out to the Federal army as a glorious
engine, consecrated to a sublime and holy purpose—even the salvation
of the nation by the preservation of the Union. And all the while, my
best-beloved brother was in the fiercest of the fight down there, in
the State dearer to me than any other could ever be. Cousins by the
score, and friends and valued acquaintances by the hundred, were with
Lee and Jackson, Early, Stuart, and Hill, exposed to shot and shell and
sword. My brother Herbert had gone home in ’61, after he was graduated
from the Theological Seminary in New Brunswick, and received a license
to preach.
Shortly after his installation in a country parish, he had married
a girl he had fallen in love with while studying with my husband
in Charlotte. Although a non-combatant, he might be forced by
circumstances to take up arms, as many of the profession were doing.
His home was raided more than once by predatory bands of stragglers
from the Federal army, and twice by cavalry dashes under leaders whose
names were a terror throughout southern and central Virginia. My
brother Percy, at fourteen, enlisted, and quickly gained reputation as
a courier under Lee’s own eye, being a daring rider, courting, instead
of shunning, danger, and, like his father and brothers, an utter
stranger to physical fear in any shape whatsoever.
When—as happened almost daily—our papers published lists of the killed
and wounded in Lee’s army, my hand shook so violently in holding the
sheet, that I had to lay it on the table to steady the lines into
legibility, my heart rolling over with sick thuds, while my eyes ran
down the line of names. Add to this ceaseless horror of suspense the
long, awful spaces of silence between the flag-of-truce letters—and
is it to be wondered at that I plunged into routine work—domestic,
literary, religious, charitable, and patriotic—with feverish energy, as
the only hope of maintaining a tolerable degree of sanity?
And how _good_ “our people” were to me through it all! The simple
act of setting the flag above our door-steps when we returned from
Rebeldom, was emblematic of the position taken and held by them, as a
body, during that trial-period. They trusted us without reservation.
Moreover, never, howsoever high might run the tide of popular feeling
at the tidings of defeat or victory to the national Cause, was one of
them ever betrayed into a word of vituperation of my native South, or
ungenerous exultation over her downfall. The tact and delicacy in this
respect displayed by them, without an exception, deserves higher praise
than I can award in this humble chronicle.
Loving loyalty of this type was a panoply and a stimulant to my
sorely-taxed spirit. Sheer gratitude should have bound me to them as a
co-worker.
When men like Peter and John Ballantine—than whom God never made a
nobler pair of brothers—and Edgar Farmer—all the busiest of men—would
go out of their way, in business hours, to make a special call upon me,
after the news of a battle had set the town on fire with excitement,
to “hope,” in brotherly solicitude, that “this does not mean a
heartache for you?”—when the safety of my brothers, and the welfare
of my parents, was the subject of affectionate inquiry, whenever we
met friend or acquaintance connected with church or parish, I used to
say to my husband and myself, that the world had never seen more truly
chivalrous natures than those of these practical Middle States men, who
never thought of themselves as knightly.