26 July 1865, South Carolina

'Johnny [Chesnut] took the Yankee captain with him to Knights Hill. That ceremony is necessary when making a contract with plantation hands now. Johnny called, 'Joe'—'William'—'Milly'—

'But is that a lady?'

'What? She was a woman servant.' The lieutenant said, pointing carelessly toward the group of negroes.

'I did not fight for these. I fought for the Union.'

'And I fought to be out of your Union.'

Then said Johnny to me, 'Aunt Mary, after all, the Yankee was not half a bad fellow.'"

July 1865, South Carolina, in the aftermath

"Yesterday there was a mass meeting of negroes, thousands of them were in town, eating, drinking, dancing, speechifying. Preaching and prayers also a popular amusement. They have no greater idea of amusement than wild prayers—unless it be getting married or going to a funeral.
In the afternoon I had some business on our place, the Hermitage. John drove me down. Our people were all at home—quiet, orderly, respectful, and at their usual work. In point of fact things looked unchanged. There was nothing to show that anyone of them had even seen a Yankee or knew that there was one in existence.
'We are in a new St Domingo all the same. The Yankees have raised the devil, and now they cannot guide him.'"

June 1865, in the aftermath

"Captain [Edward] Barnwell came to see us. We had a dinner for them at Mulberry—out of the Bloomsbury air. Stephen Elliot was there. He said when people began at him with Sherman or Potter raids, &c&c, he clapped his hands to his ears. He was so tired of it. ...
He gave us an account of his father's plantation at Beaufort [South Carolina], from which he has just returned.
'Our negroes are living in great comfort. They were delighted to see me and treated me with overflowing affection. They waited on me as before, gave me beautiful breakfasts, splendid dinners, &c&c. But they firmly and respectfully informed me: "We own this land now. Put it out of your head that it will ever be yours again."'"

12 June 1865, South Carolina, the bushwhackers

"I have been ill since I wrote last. Serena's letter.* They have been visited by bushwhackers, the roughs that always follow in the wake of an army.

My sister Kate they forced back against the wall. She had Katie, the baby, in her arms, and Miller, the brave boy, clung to his mother, though he could do no more. They tried to force brandy down her throat. They knocked Mary down with the butt end of a pistol, and Serena they struck with an open hand, leaving the mark on her cheek for weeks. When they struck Mary, Serena seized the captain's arm. 'Do you let your men do that?' And she showed Mary's bleeding head. 'No, no,' he said, 'that's too bad. You keep all together, and I will get them away for tonight, and then you go off at once.' Which they did that night to the Kings—the next day to Greenville. It was too much. It made me ill."

*Serena Miller Williams was a niece of Mary Boykin Chesnut, daughter of MBC's younger sister Catherine "Kate" Miller and David Rogerson Williams II. In June 1865, Serena was sixteen years old.

4 June 1865, South Carolina, coming & going & coming again

"The black ball is in motion. Mrs DeSaussure's cook shook the dust off her feet and departed from her kitchen today, free, she said. The washerwoman packing to go.
Scipio Africanus, the colonel's body servant, is a soldierly looking black creature to delight the eyes of old Frederick William, who liked them giants. We asked him how the Yankees came to leave him.
'Oh, I told them Marster couldn't do without me nohow, and then I carried them some nice hams that they never could have found, they were hid so good.'
Eben* dressed himself in his best and went at a run to meet his Yankee deliverers, so he said. At the gate he met a squad coming in. He had adorned himself with his watch and a chain, like the cordage of a ship, with a handful of gaudy seals. He knew the Yankees came to rob white people, but he thought they came to save niggers.
'Hand over that watch!' Minus his fine watch and chain, Eben returned a sadder and wiser man. He was soon in his shirtsleeves, whistling at his knife board.
'Why? You here? Why did you come back so soon?'
'Well, I thought maybe better stay with ole Marster that give me the watch and not go with them that stole it.'
The watch was the pride of his life. The iron had entered his soul."

*Chesnut slave butler

June 1865, in the aftermath

Ruins of Millwood Plantation, Columbia, South Carolina
(family home of Wade Hampton II, father of Gen. Wade Hampton III)
destroyed by fire during Sherman's occupation in February 1865

"New York Herald today quotes General Sherman, who says, 'Columbia was burnt by Hampton's sheer stupidity.' But then, who burnt everything before they got to Columbia and after the Sherman army left it? We came down, for three days' travel, on a road laid bare by Sherman's torches. There were nothing but smoking ruins left in Sherman's track. That I saw with my own eyes–no living thing left, no house left for man or beast. They who burnt the countryside for a belt of forty miles—did they not burn the town? Hampton's stupidity is an afterthought. This Herald announces that Jeff Davis will be hung at once—not so much for treason as for his assassination of Lincoln. 'Stanton,' the Herald says, 'has all the papers in his hands to convict him.'
The Yankees here say: 'The black man must go—as the red man has gone. This is a white man's country.'
The negroes want to run with the hare but hunt with the hounds. They are charming in their profession to us but declare that they are to be paid in lands and mules for having been slaves—by those blessed Yankees.
'They were so faithful to us—why should the Yankees reward them?'
'It would be by way of punishing the rebels only.'"

1 June 1865, South Carolina

"Went to the Hermitage yesterday (our plantation). Saw no change–not a soul absent from his or her post. I said, 'Good colored folks, when are you going to kick off the traces and be free?'
In their furious emotional way they swore devotion to us to their dying day.
All the same, the minute they see an opening to better themselves they will move on.
William, my husband's foster brother, came up.
'Well, William, what do you want?'
'Only to look at you, Marster—it does me good.' No doubt it paid. Both parties, white and black, talked beautifully."

7 May 1865, 'Mulberry,' South Carolina

"Mrs Bartow drove with me to our house at Mulberry. On one side of the house every window was broken, every bell torn down, every piece of furniture destroyed, every door smashed in. The other side intact.
Maria Whitaker and her mother, who had been left in charge, explained this odd state of things.
'They were busy as beavers. They were working like regular carpenters, destroying everything, when the general came in. He said it was a shame, and he stopped them. Said it was a sin to destroy a fine old house like that whose owner was over ninety years old. He would not have done it for the world. It was wanton mischief.' He told Maria soldiers at such times were so excited, so wild and unruly.
They carried off sacks of our books. Unfortunately there were a pile of empty sacks lying in the garret. Our books, our papers, our letters, were strewed along the Charleston road. Somebody said they found some of them as far away as Vance's Ferry.
This was Potter's raid.* Sherman took only our horses. Potter's raid, which was after Johnston's surrender, ruined us finally, burning our mills and gins and a hundred bales of cotton. Indeed nothing is left now but the bare land and debts made for the support of these hundreds of negroes during the war."

*A Federal expeditionary force under Brig. Gen. Edward E. Potter spent three weeks in April 1865 destroying Confederate supplies and railroad lines around Camden, South Carolina.

2 May 1865, Camden, South Carolina

"Camden. From the roadside near Blackstock.

Since we left Chester—solitude. Nothing but tall blackened chimneys to show that any man has ever trod this road before us.

This is Sherman's track. It is hard not to curse him.

I wept incessantly at first. 'The roses of these gardens are already hiding the ruins,' said Mr C. 'Nature is a wonderful renovator.' He tried to say something.

Then I shut my eyes and made a vow. If we are a crushed people, crushed by aught, I have vowed never to be a whimpering pining slave."

April 1865, in the aftermath

"Mrs Huger says, 'In Richmond a too grateful and affectionate, fat, greasy negro barber threw his arms around a Yankee general and hugged in a close embrace. The Yankee freed himself and shot him dead.'"

23 April 1865, Chester, South Carolina

"And these negroes—unchanged. The shining black mask they wear does not show a ripple of change—sphinxes. [House slave] Ellen has had my diamonds to keep for a week or so. When the danger was over she handed them back to me, with as little apparent interest in the matter as if they were garden peas."

22 April 1865, the Lincoln assassination

"Colonel Cad Jones came with a dispatch, a sealed secret dispatch. It was for General Chesnut. I opened it.

Lincoln—old Abe Lincoln—killed—murdered—Seward wounded!*

Why? By whom? It is simply maddening, all this.

I sent off messenger after messenger for General Chesnut. I have not the faintest idea where he is, but I know this foul murder will bring down worse miseries on us.

Mary Darby says: 'But they murdered him themselves. No Confederates in Washington.'

'But if they see fit to accuse us of instigating it?'

'Who murdered him?'

'Who knows?'

'See if they don't take vengeance on us, now that we are ruined and cannot repel the any longer.'"

*The shooting occurred the evening of 14 April 1865.

April 1865, Chester, South Carolina

"We are going to stay. Running is useless now. So we mean to bide a Yankee raid, which they say is imminent, Why fly? They are everywhere, these Yankees—like red ants—like the locusts and frogs which were the plagues of Egypt."

19 April 1865, Chester, South Carolina

"Just now Mr Clay* dashed upstairs pale as a sheet.
'General Lee has capitulated.'**
I saw it reflected in Mary Darby's face before I heard him. She staggered to the table, sat down, and wept aloud. Clay's eyes were not dry.
Quite beside herself, Mary shrieked, 'Now we belong to negroes and Yankees!' Buck said, 'I do not believe it.'"

*Clement Claiborne Clay, Jr
**At Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865

7 April 1865, Richmond falls

Richmond, Virginia
April 1865

"Richmond has fallen—and I have no heart to write about it. Grant broke through our lines. Sherman cut through them. Stoneman is this side of Danville.

They are too many for us.

Everything lost in Richmond, even our archives.

Blue-black is our horizon."

A Lincolnton recollection, 1865

"One day Isabella [Martin] and I met Mr Clarke from Columbia, and from him I derived my first real idea of the ruin this war had brought—or Sherman, rather. Mr Clarke all unshaven and shorn was brandishing a chair, holding it aloft, like a banner, by its one remaining rung. 'This is all I have left of my Columbia house and all my earthly possessions!' Mr Clarke was one of the rich men of Columbia."

30 March 1865, Chester, South Carolina

"I said to General Preston, 'I pass my days and nights partly at this window. I am sure our army is silently dispersing. Men are passing the wrong way—all the time they slip by. No songs nor shouts now. They have given the thing up. See for yourself—look there!' For a while the streets were thronged with soldiers, and then they were empty again. The marching now is without tap of drum. I told him of the woman in the cracker bonnet at the depot at Charlotte who signaled to her husband as they dragged him off. 'Take it easy, Jake—you desert again, quick as you kin—come back to your wife and children.' And she continued to yell, 'Desert, Jake! desert agin, Jake!'"

29 March 1865

"My world is now divided—where the Yankees are and where the Yankees are not."

27 March 1865, Chester, South Carolina

"Lee and Johnston have each fought a drawn battle.* Only a few more dead bodies stiff and stark on an unknown battlefield. For we do not so much as know where these drawn battles took place.
One can never exaggerate the horrors of war on one's own soil. You understand the agony, strive as you will to speak, the agony of heart—mind—body.
'A few more men killed.' A few more women weeping their eyes out, and nothing whatever decided by it more than we knew before the battle."

*On 25 March 1865, Robert E. Lee's troops suffered heavy losses in storming and then abandoning Fort Stedman, east of Petersburg, Virginia. A few days earlier, Joseph E. Johnston also sustained many losses when he unsuccessfully attacked one of Sherman's columns at Bentonville, North Carolina. 

March 1865, Lincolnton, North Carolina

"Yarn is our circulating medium. It is the current coin of the realm. At a factory here, Mrs Glover traded off a negro woman for yarn. The woman wanted to go there as a factory hand, so it suited all round. I held up my hands! Mrs Munro said:
'Mrs Glover knows she will be free in a few days. Besides, that's nothing. Yesterday a negro man was sold for a keg of nails.'
'God's will be done,' escaped from Mr Martin's lips, in utter amazement.
'This shows slavery is in its death throes.'
'General C said we were lighthearted at the ruin of the great slave-owners. An unholy joy.'
They will have no negroes now to lord it over. They can swell and peacock about and tyrannize now over only a small parcel of women and children—those only who are their very own family."

5 March 1865, Columbia in ruins

The Burning of Columbia, South Carolina, 1865,
by William Waud for Harper's Weekly

"Columbia is but dust and ashes—burned to the ground. Men, women, and children left there, houseless, homeless, without one particle of food—picking up the corn left by Sherman's horses in their picket ground and parching it to stay their hunger."