21 September 1861

"Poor Cousin Betsey Witherspoon* was murdered! She did not die peacefully, as we supposed, in her bed. Murdered by her own people. Her negroes.
I remember when Dr Keitt was murdered by his negroes. Mr Miles met me and told the dreadful story.
'Very awkward, this sort of thing. There goes Keitt, in the house always declaiming about the "beneficent institution." How now?'
Horrible beyond words.
Her household negroes were so insolent, so pampered and insubordinate, that she lived alone and at home. She knew, she said, that none of her children would have the patience she had with these people who had been indulged and spoiled by her until they were like spoiled children. Simply intolerable.
Mr Chesnut and David Williams have gone over at once." ...

24 September 1861

"Hitherto I have never thought of being afraid of negroes. I had never injured any of them. Why should they want to hurt me? Two-thirds of my religion consists in trying to be good to negroes because they are so in my power, and it would be so easy to be the other thing. Somehow today I feel that the ground is cut away from under my feet. Why should they treat me any better than they have done Cousin Betsey Witherspoon?"

*Elizabeth Boykin "Betsey" Witherspoon was the widow of John Dick Witherspoon, a wealthy planter, lawyer, and state legislator of Darlington District, South Carolina. She was a first cousin of Mary Boykin Chesnut's mother, as well as mother-in-law of a niece of M.B.C.'s husband James Chesnut, Jr.

19 September 1861, 'Mulberry,' South Carolina

"The high and disinterested conduct our enemies seem to expect of us is involuntary and unconscious praise.
They pay us the compliment to look for from us—a degree of virtue they were never able to practice themselves. A word of our crowning misdemeanor, holding in slavery still those Africans they brought here from Africa or sold to us when they found they did not pay. They gradually slided (or slid?) them off down here. Freed them prospectively, giving themselves years to get rid of them in a remunerative way. We want to spread them, too—west and south—or northwest, where the climate would free them or kill them, improve them out of the world as they do Indians. If they had been forced to keep them in New England, I daresay they would have shared the Indians' fate. For they are wise in their generation, these Yankee children of light. Those pernicious Africans!
Result of the conversation between Mr C and Uncle John—both ci-devant Union men. Now utterly for states rights."

August 1861, in transit

"Coming home, the following conversation....
'Suppose the women and children secede?'
'Knit your stocking. We have had enough for today.'
Aside: 'She was trying to imitate Thackeray.'
'But you know, our women all speak in that low, plaintive way because they are always excusing themselves for something they never did.'
'And the Yankee women are loud and shrill because they fight it out—fair field and no favor—and when incompatibility comes in, they go out for divorce. And they talk as if money only bought black women in slave countries. Women are bought and sold everywhere.'"

29 August 1861, women as suspects

"Our party of matrons had their shot at those saints and martyrs and patriots, the imprisoned Greenhow and Phillips.
Those poor souls are guarded night and day. It is a hideous tale, what they tell of their suffering.
Mrs Lee punned upon the odd expression 'Ladies of their age being confined.'
These old Washington habitués say Mrs Greenhow had herself confined and persecuted, that we might trust her the more. She sees we distrust her after all. The Manassas men swear she was our good angel.
And the Washington women say: up to the highest bidder, always. And they have the money on us.
Women who come before the public are in a bad box now. False hair is taken off and searched for papers. Pistols are sought for [under] 'cotillions renversés.' Bustles are 'suspect.' All manner of things, they say, come over the border under the huge hoops now worn. So they are ruthlessly torn off. Not legs but arms are looked for under hoops. And sad to say, found. Then women are used as detectives and searchers to see that no men come over in petticoats.
So the poor creatures coming this way are humiliated to the deepest degree. I think these times make all women feel their humiliation in the affairs of the world. . . . Women can only stay at home, and every paper reminds us that women are to be violated, ravished, and all manner of humiliation.
To men—glory, honor, praise, and power—if they are patriots.
To women—daughters of Eve—punishment comes still in some shape, do what they will."

27 August 1861, Rose O'Neal Greenhow

"A jury of matrons, so to speak, sat here on Mrs Greenhow.* They say Mrs Phillips and Mrs Gwin have been arrested also.

Rose O'Neal Greenhow
(c. 1815-1864), pictured with her daughter

No doubt Mrs Greenhow furnished Beauregard with the latest news of the Federal movements—and so made the Manassas fiasco a possibility. She sent us the enemy's plans. Everything she said proved true, numbers, route, &c&c."

*Rose O'Neal Greenhow led the Washington spy ring that passed Union secrets to the Confederates before Bull Run. On 23 August 1861, Pinkerton agents searched Mrs Greenhow's Washington home, placed her under house arrest, and detained several of her associates, including Eugenia Levy Phillips. The news of Mary Bell Gwin's arrest was false.

23 August 1861, Richmond

"Have been with Mrs Randolph to all the hospitals.
I can never again shut out of view the sights I saw of human misery. I sit thinking, shut my eyes, and see it all. Thinking—yes, and there is enough to think about now, God knows. Gillands was the worst. Long rows of ill men on cots. Ill of typhoid fever, of every human ailment—dinner tables, eating, drinking, wounds being dressed—all horrors, to be taken in at one glance. That long tobacco house!...
Then we went to the St Charles. Horrors upon horrors again—want of organization. Long rows of them dead, dying. Awful smell, awful sights.
A boy from home had sent for me. He was lying in a cot, ill of fever. Next him a man died in convulsions while we stood there.
I was making arrangements with a nurse, hiring him to take care of this lad. I do not remember any more, for I fainted. Next that I knew of, the doctor and Mrs Randolph were having me, a limp rag, put into the carriage at the door at the hospital.
Fresh air, I dare say, brought me to. First of all we had given our provisions to our Carolinians at Miss Sally Tompkins's. There they were, nice and clean and merry as grigs.
As we drove home, we brought the doctor with us, I was so upset.
He said: 'Look at that Georgia regiment marching there. Look at their servants on the sidewalk. I have been counting them—making an estimate. There is $16,000—sixteen thousand dollars worth of negro property which can go off on its own legs to the Yankees whenever it pleases.'
We saw among the wounded at the Federal hospital a negro soldier. He was with the others, on equal terms—and a sister was nursing him."

August 1861, the toll of disease

"General Walker (Shot-Pouch) fears [Union General George B.] McClellan will take advantage of our army being prostrated by disease to attack us. One good of Bull Run: it has made them make haste cautiously.
In [General William H. C.] Whiting's command 400 out of 1700 are unfit for service."

August 1861, the subject of slavery

"A General Wool* says, 'This war is an attempt to extend the area of slavery.'
Can that be, when not one-third of our volunteer army are slave-owners—and not one-third of that third who does not dislike slavery as much as Mrs Stowe or Greeley?** And few have found their hatred or love of it as remunerative an investment."

*War of 1812 veteran U.S. Brigadier General John Ellis Wool, quoted from a speech in New York, 15 August 1861.
**Harriet Beecher Stowe was author of the 1852 bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin, Horace Greeley editor of the New York Tribune. 

18 August 1861, the subject of desertion

"Two Yankee officers who fought or figured at Manassas have since deserted and come over to us.
I can understand how deserters should be detestable, come they from East or West, North or South.
They, the deserters, are going into our army. General Walker* said, 'If I had a brother killed at Manassas, I could shoot down these two man at sight.'
Mr [Robert Woodward] Barnwell gave that little twittering, nervous laugh of his.
'And then you'd be hanged.'
'Never. Twenty thousand Georgians are here. They would create a counter-revolution before they would permit a hair of my head to be touched.'
Mr Barnwell repeated his offensive little laugh.
'Then you would be hanged. You ought to be hanged if you commit murder.'

This he fired off at regular intervals, and Shot-Pouch Walker literally raved.
'No, no. My Georgians would know the reason why, &c&c.'
Mr Barnwell grew very quiet but continued his fatuous smile and to the last stuck to his original proposition.
'You'd be hanged.'
This made me wretched. Mr Barnwell was right, but why would he say it anymore?
I was so uncomfortable—as soon as silence prevailed, I left the table. I made a good deal of commotion in leaving the table, on purpose—dropped things to be picked up: fan, handkerchief—all to divert them from their madness or folly. And a man is always in such a faze about his dignity—what is due his own self-respect, &c&c&c, and so contemptuous of feminine folly!"

*Brigadier General William Henry Talbot Walker of Georgia received extensive gunshot wounds in both the Seminole and Mexican wars. Each time, doctors held out no hope of recovery. He was subsequently given the nickname "Shot-Pouch."

August 1861, George Mason on slavery

"General and Mrs Cooper came to see us. She is Mrs Smith Lee's sister, Senator Mason's sister.
'Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother'—&c. They were talking of old George Mason, in Virginia a name to conjure with.
George Mason violently opposed the extension of slavery. He was a thorough aristocrat and gave as his reason for refusing the blessing of slaves to the new states—southwest and northwest—that vulgar new people were unworthy of so sacred a right as that of holding slaves. It was not an institution intended for such people as they were.
Mrs Lee said, 'After all—what good does it do my sons? They are Light Horse Harry Lee's grandsons—and George Mason's. I do not see that it helps them at all.'
When Mrs Lee and the Coopers had gone, what a rolling of eyes and uplifting of hands...."