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.

16 February 1865, Lincolnton, North Carolina, "those last days"

"My ideas of those last days are confused.
The Martins left Columbia the Friday before I did. And their mammy, the negro woman who had nursed them, refused to go with them. That daunted me. Then Mrs McCord, who was to send her girls with me, changed her mind. She sent them upstairs in her house—and actually took away the staircase—that was her plan.
Then I met Mr Christopher Hampton arranging to take off his sisters. They were flitting—but only as far as Yorkville. He said it was time to move on. Sherman at Orangeburg was barely a day's journey from Columbia, and that he left a track as bare and blackened as a fire in the prairies.
So my time had come, too. My husband urged me to go home. He said Camden would be safe enough. They had no spite to that old town—as they have to Charleston and Columbia. Molly, weeping and wailing, came in while we were at table, wiping her red-hot face with her cook's grimy apron. She said I ought to go among our own black people on the plantation. They would take care of me better than anyone else. So I agreed to go to Mulberry or the Hermitage plantation and sent Laurence with a wagon load of my valuables.
Then a Miss Patterson called—a refugee from Tennessee. She had been in a country overrun by Yankee invaders—and she described so graphically all the horrors to be endured by those subjected to fire and sword and rapine and plunder that I was fairly scared and determined to come here. This is a thoroughly out-of-all-routes place. And yet I can go to Charlotte. I am halfway to Kate at Flat Rock. And there is no Federal army between me and Richmond."