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.

9 July 1862, Columbia, South Carolina

"Table talk today:
This war was undertaken by us to shake off the yoke of foreign invaders. So we consider our cause righteous. The Yankees, since the war has begun, have discovered it is to free the slaves they are fighting—so their cause is noble. They also expect to make the war pay. Yankees do not undertake anything that does not pay. They think we belong to them. We have been good milk cows. Milked by the tariff, or skimmed. We let them have all of our hard earnings. We bore the ban of slavery. They got the money. Cotton pays everybody who handles it, sells it, manufactures it, &c&c—rarely pays the men who make it. Secondhand, they received the wages of slavery. They grew rich, we grew poor. Receiver is as bad as the thief. That applies to us, too—we received these savages they stole from Africa and brought to us in their slave ships. Like the Egyptians, if they let us go, it must be across a red sea of blood."

20 November 1861

"England is patting both sides on the back. She loves to see a Kilkenny cat fight. After all, she is not denying for the want of our cotton. She is prospering and pampering her Indian cotton and will magnanimously accept any apology for the Mason and Slidell affair that smart Yankee [Secretary of State William Henry] Seward will tender her."

20 May 1861, James Chesnut, Jr

James Chesnut, Jr
(1815-1885)

"Oh, Mr Chesnut's three crazes: Maryland to be made seat of war, old Morrow's idea of buying up steamers abroad for our coast defenses, and last of all, make as much cotton and send it to England as a bank to draw on. The very cotton we have now, if sent across the water, could be a gold mine to us."