Though Southern rural life has necessarily changed since the Civil
War, I doubt that there is in the entire South a place where it has
changed less than on the Burge Plantation, near Covington, Georgia.
And I do not know in the whole country a place that I should rather
see again in springtime--the Georgia springtime, when the air is like
a tonic vapor distilled from the earth, from pine trees, tulip trees,
balm-of-Gilead trees (or "bam" trees, as the negroes call them),
blossoming Judas trees, Georgia crab-apple, dogwood pink and white,
peach blossom, wistaria, sweet-shrub, dog violets, pansy violets,
Cherokee roses, wild honeysuckle, azalia, and the evanescent green of
new treetops, all carried in solution in the sunlight.
It is indicative of the fidelity of the plantation to its old
traditions that though more than threescore springs have come and gone
since Sherman and his army crossed the red cottonfields surrounding
the plantation house, and though the Burge family name died out, many
years ago, with Mrs. Thomas Burge, a portion of whose wartime journal
makes up the body of this book, the place continues to be known by her
name and her husband's, as it was when they resided there before the
Civil War. Some of the negroes mentioned in the journal still live in
cabins on the plantation, and almost all the younger generation are
the children or grandchildren of Mrs. Burge's former slaves.
Mrs. Burge (Dolly Sumner Lunt) was born September 29, 1817, in
Bowdoinham, Maine. That she was brought up in New England, in the
heart of the abolitionist movement, and that she was a relative of
Charles Sumner, consistent foe of the South, lends peculiar interest
to the sentiments on slavery expressed in her journal. As a young
woman she moved from Maine to Georgia, where her married sister was
already settled. While teaching school in Covington she met Thomas
Burge, a plantation-owner and gentleman of the Old South, and
presently married him. When some years later Mr. Burge died, Mrs.
Burge was left on the plantation with her little daughter Sarah (the
"Sadai" of the journal) and her slaves, numbering about one hundred.
Less than three years after she was widowed the Civil War broke out,
and in 1864 this cultivated and charming woman saw Sherman's army pass
across her fields on the March to the Sea.
At the time of my visit to the plantation the world was aghast over
the German invasion of Belgium, the horrors of which had but recently
been fully revealed and confirmed.... What, then, I began to wonder,
must life have been in this part of Georgia, when Sherman's men came
by? What must it have been to the woman and the little girl living on
these acres, in this very house? For though Germany's assault was upon
an unoffending neutral state and was the commencement of a base war,
whereas Sherman's March through Georgia was an invasion of what was
then the enemy's country for the purpose of "breaking the back" of
that enemy and thus terminating the war, nevertheless "military
necessity" was the excuse in either case for a campaign of deliberate
destruction--which, in the State of Georgia, was measured by Sherman
himself at one hundred millions.
When, therefore, I learned that Mrs. Burge had kept a journal in which
were related her experiences throughout this period, I became eager to
see it; and I am sure the reader will agree that I did him a good turn
when, after perusing the journal, I begged its author's
granddaughters--Mrs. M.J. Morehouse of Evanston, Ills., and Mrs. Louis
Bolton of Detroit, Mich., my hostesses at the plantation--that they
permit it to be published.
Their consent having graciously been given, I can only wish that the
reader might sit, as I did, perusing the story in the very house, in
the very room, in which it was written. I wish he might turn the
yellow pages with me, and read for himself of events which seem,
somehow, more vivid for the fact that the ink is faded brown with
time. And I wish that when the journal tells of "bluecoats coming down
the road" the reader might glance up and out through the open window,
as I did, and see the very road down which they came.
Imagine yourself in a low white house standing in a grove of gigantic
oaks surrounded by the cottonfields. Imagine yourself in a large
comfortable room in this house, in an old rocking chair by the window.
From the window you may see the white well-house, its roof mottled
with the shadows of branches above; beyond, the garden and the road,
and far away in the red fields negroes and mules at work. Then look
down at the large book resting in your lap and read.