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."