XL Domestic Sorrows and National Storm and Stress — Friends, Tried and True
We were to need all the fulness of consolation that could be expressed from divine grace and human friendships, in the years immediately succeeding the events recorded in the last chapter.
The Muse of American History has set a bloody and fire-blackened cross against 1861. To us, it was darkened, through three-quarters of its weary length, by the shadows of graves. One death after another among the friends to whom we clung the more gratefully, because of the gulf—fast filling with blood—that parted us from kindred and early companions, followed our home-coming. In the last week of August, my husband recorded, in his pastor’s notebook, that he had stood, in fourteen weeks, at the open graves of as many parishioners, among them some who had been most forward in welcoming him to his new field, and most faithful in their support of him in it.
“It is literally walking in the valley of the shadow of death!” he sighed, closing the melancholy pages. “I ask myself tremblingly, after each funeral—Who next?”
At noon on September second—the fifth anniversary of our wedding-day—our boy came home from a drive with his father, feverish and drowsy, and fell asleep in my arms. On the fourteenth of the same month, he was folded in an embrace, yet more fond and safe, beyond the touch of mortal sorrow.
My bonnie, bonnie boy! who had never had a day’s illness until he was stricken by that from which there was no recovery! Diphtheria was comparatively new at that time, even to the able physician who was our devoted personal friend. The boy faded before it, as a lily in drought. Four days before he left us, his baby sister was smitten by the same disease. Two days after the funeral, their father fell ill with it. Why neither Alice, I, nor the faithful nurse who assisted us in the care of the three patients, did not take the infection is a mystery. There were no quarantine regulations to prevent the spread of what is now recognized as one of the most virulent of epidemics. We took absolutely no precautions; friends flocked to us as freely as if there were no danger. Our fearlessness may have been a catholicon. We nursed the sufferers back to health, and, looking to God for strength, took our places again in the ranks.
Such a trite, every-day story as it is! To the soul for which the task is set, it is as novel and crucial as death itself. It is not the young mother who finds comfort and tonic in the inspired assurance:
“For while we bear it, we can bear;
Past that—we lay it down!”
For four months, we had not a letter from Richmond. The cordon was drawn closely about the chief seat of the Rebellion—now the capital of the Confederacy. It was hard to smuggle private letters through the lines. We wrote by every possible opportunity, and were certain that my family were as watchful of chances, likely and improbable. At Christmas, we had a packet that had been run through by way of Kentucky, by a man who wrote to say that he had been ill in a Richmond hospital and received great kindness from my mother. When he was well enough to rejoin his regiment, he had offered to get her letters to me, if it were in the power of man to do it. His plan, he said, was to entrust the parcel to a trusty negro, who would swim the Ohio River on horseback at a point where the stream was narrow, and post letters on the other side. If I should receive them, I might know that he had fulfilled his pledge to my mother. If I did not get them, I would never know how hard he had tried to keep his word.
I have often wondered if he received the answers we dispatched to the post-office from which our precious letters were mailed. I never heard from him again.
Home-bulletins brought the news of the death of my stern old grandmother at the advanced age of eighty-four. She had never given her sanction to the war, disapproving of military operations with the whole might of her rugged nature. On a certain Sunday in June, news was brought by fast express, while the people were in church, that the war-vessel Pawnee was on its way up the river to bombard the town. Owing to the old lady’s deafness, she did not fully comprehend why the services were closed summarily, and the streets were too full of people hurrying to and fro, for my father to explain the state of affairs on the way home. On the front steps they met my brother Horace in the uniform of the Richmond Howitzers, to which he belonged. They had been ordered summarily to repair to the point from which the expected attack was to be repelled. A few hasty sentences put her into possession of leading facts; the boy kissed her; shook hands with his father, and ran down the street.
The old Massachusetts dame, whose father and husband had fought in the Revolutionary War, stood still and looked after him until he was out of sight.
He was her favorite of the boys—we fancied because he resembled the Edwin she had wished to adopt, and who died in her arms.
The lad she followed with puzzled and griefful eyes was of a goodly presence, and never goodlier than in his uniform. Did she bethink herself of the probability that she might never see him again? What she thought, and what she felt, will never be known. When my father addressed her, she gazed at him with uncomprehending eyes, turned, and walked feebly up the stairs.
“I am afraid mother is not well,” said my father to my mother, after they had talked a few minutes of the alarm and Horace’s departure. “She looked shaken by the boy’s going. Will you go up and look after her?”
She had undressed and gone to bed. She had taken her seat in church that morning, a fine-looking dame of the old school; erect and strong; alert of wits and firm of purpose. My mother looked into the face of a shrunken, dull-eyed crone, who asked, in quavering accents, “Who she was, and what was her business?” Then she began to moan and beg to be taken “home.” That was her cry, whenever she spoke at all, all summer long. But once did she quit her bed. That was when the nurse left her, as they supposed, sleeping, and discovered her half an hour later, fumbling at the lock of the front door, and in her nightgown. She “wanted to go home! she would go home!” She went on September 5th, while we, hundreds of miles away, were watching over our sick boy.
“The war killed off most of our old people,” said an ex-Confederate officer once to me. “Almost as many died of sheer brokenheartedness, as on the battle-field! That’s an account somebody has got to settle some day, if there is any justice in heaven.”
In the autumn of 1862, the state of my sister Alice’s health demanded a change of climate so imperatively that we had no option in the consideration of the emergency. Her throat was seriously affected; she had not spoken above a whisper for six months. To keep her in Newark for another winter was not to be thought of. Our parents were writing by every available flag of truce strenuous orders that she should “come home.” In early October, Mr. Terhune took her down to an obscure village in Maryland directly upon Chesapeake Bay. It was, in fact, a smuggling-station, from which merchandise of various sorts was ferried into Virginia, in direct violation of embargo laws. Southern sympathizers, whom loyalists were beginning to brand as “Copperheads”—a name that stuck fast to them throughout the war—ran the enterprise and profited by it. Through one of these, information sifted to us of which we made use. When necessity drives, it will not do to be fastidious as to instruments that will save us.
At dead of night my young sister was put into a boat, warmly wrapped from the river-fogs, and, in charge of a Richmond gentleman who was returning home, sent across the unlicensed ferry. Her father awaited her on the other shore. A mile above and a mile below, lurid gleams, like the eyes of river-monsters watching for their prey, showed where United States gunboats lay in mid-stream to intercept unlawful commerce and to arrest offenders. My husband did not impart to me the details of the adventure until we had heard of the child’s restoration to her father’s arms. Then he told of the fearful anxiety with which he waited on the Maryland shore, under starless skies, scanning the menacing lights up and down the river, and straining his ears for the ripple against the sides of the boat making its way, cautiously, with muffled oars, across the watery track. To deflect from the viewless course would be to awaken the sleeping dogs of war. The lonely watcher feared every minute to see from either of the gunboats a flash of fire, followed by the boom of a cannon, signalling the discovery of the attempt to evade the embargo.
“The dreariest vigil imaginable!” he said. “I stayed there for two hours, until I was sure the boat must have made the landing. Had it been intercepted, I should have seen some change in the position of those red eyes and heard a shot.”
Before she embarked he had given the fugitive a self-addressed envelope enclosing a card, on which was written: “Arrived safely.” She pencilled below—“Alice,” and sent it back by the boatman. It was a week old when he got it, and creased and soiled by much handling.
Then fell silence, that was felt every waking hour, and lasted for four long months. On the first day of February, my husband being absent from home, I walked down to the city post-office with Mrs. Greenleaf, my eldest sister-in-law, who was visiting us, and took from our box a thin letter addressed in my mother’s hand, and stamped “Flag of Truce.”
It was but one page in length. Flag-of-truce communications were limited to that. The first line branded itself upon my brain:
“I have written to you several times since our precious Alice’s death!”
She had rallied finely in her native air, and was, apparently, on the highroad to health when smallpox broke out in Richmond military hospitals. It spread to the citizens. The town was crowded, and quarantine laws were lax. Dr. Haxall called and insisted that the entire family be re-vaccinated. He had his way with all save one. Alice put him off with a jest, and my mother bade him “call again, when she may be more reasonable.” I fancy none of them put much faith in the honest physician’s assertion that the precautionary measure was a necessity. In those days a “good vaccination scar” was supposed to last a lifetime. My sister fell ill a fortnight afterward, and the seizure was pronounced to be “varioloid.”
A girl’s wilful whim! A mother’s indulgence! These may, or may not, have been the opening acts of the tragedy. God knows!
Alice was in her twenty-second year, and in mind the most brilliant of the family. She was an ardent student for learning’s sake, and an accomplished English scholar; wrote and spoke French fluently, and was proficient in the Latin classics. The one sketch from her pen ever published appeared in The Southern Literary Messenger while she was ill. It proved what we had known already, that her talent for composition was of a high order. Had she lived, the reading world would have ratified our judgment.
On March 7th of that dark and bloody year, the low tide of hope with the nation, our home was brightened by the birth of a second daughter—our first brunette bairnie. Her brother and sister had the Terhune blue eyes and sunny hair. She came on a wild, snowy day, and brought such wealth of balm and blessing with her as seldom endows parents and home by reason of a single birth. From the hour of her advent, Baby Alice was her father’s idol. Why, we could not say then. The fact—amusing at times—always patent—of the peculiar tenderness binding together the hearts of the father and the girl-child—remained, and was gradually accepted, without comment, by us all.
It was an unspeakable comfort to be able once more to talk of “the children.” One never divines the depth of sweetness and significance in the term until one has been robbed of the right to use it, through months of missing what has been.
Other, if minor, distractions from personal sorrow and public solicitudes were not wanting that year. I had been drawn into charitable organizations born of the times. Our noble church was forward in co-operation with municipal and State authorities in relieving the distress of the thousands who were reduced to poverty by the loss of the Southern trade and the stagnation of home industries. Prices went up, and wages went down; soldiers’ widows and orphans must be cared for; the soldiers in camps and hospitals were but ill-provided with the comforts they had a right to expect from the government and their fellow-citizens. We had Soldiers’ Relief Societies, and Auxiliary Societies to the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, and by-and-by, as the monetary situation told fiercely upon the women and children of unemployed operatives, associations that supplied their wives with sewing.
But for active participation in each of these benevolent organizations, I do not see how I could have kept my reason while the fratricidal conflict gathered force and heat.
My situation was peculiar, and, among my daily associates, unique. Loving the Union with a passion of patriotism inconceivable by those who have never had what they call by that name put to such test of rack and flame as the martyrs of old endured, I yet had no personal interest in one soldier who fought for the Cause as dear to me as life itself. My prayers and hopes went out to the Federal army as a glorious engine, consecrated to a sublime and holy purpose—even the salvation of the nation by the preservation of the Union. And all the while, my best-beloved brother was in the fiercest of the fight down there, in the State dearer to me than any other could ever be. Cousins by the score, and friends and valued acquaintances by the hundred, were with Lee and Jackson, Early, Stuart, and Hill, exposed to shot and shell and sword. My brother Herbert had gone home in ’61, after he was graduated from the Theological Seminary in New Brunswick, and received a license to preach.
Shortly after his installation in a country parish, he had married a girl he had fallen in love with while studying with my husband in Charlotte. Although a non-combatant, he might be forced by circumstances to take up arms, as many of the profession were doing. His home was raided more than once by predatory bands of stragglers from the Federal army, and twice by cavalry dashes under leaders whose names were a terror throughout southern and central Virginia. My brother Percy, at fourteen, enlisted, and quickly gained reputation as a courier under Lee’s own eye, being a daring rider, courting, instead of shunning, danger, and, like his father and brothers, an utter stranger to physical fear in any shape whatsoever.
When—as happened almost daily—our papers published lists of the killed and wounded in Lee’s army, my hand shook so violently in holding the sheet, that I had to lay it on the table to steady the lines into legibility, my heart rolling over with sick thuds, while my eyes ran down the line of names. Add to this ceaseless horror of suspense the long, awful spaces of silence between the flag-of-truce letters—and is it to be wondered at that I plunged into routine work—domestic, literary, religious, charitable, and patriotic—with feverish energy, as the only hope of maintaining a tolerable degree of sanity?
And how good “our people” were to me through it all! The simple act of setting the flag above our door-steps when we returned from Rebeldom, was emblematic of the position taken and held by them, as a body, during that trial-period. They trusted us without reservation. Moreover, never, howsoever high might run the tide of popular feeling at the tidings of defeat or victory to the national Cause, was one of them ever betrayed into a word of vituperation of my native South, or ungenerous exultation over her downfall. The tact and delicacy in this respect displayed by them, without an exception, deserves higher praise than I can award in this humble chronicle.
Loving loyalty of this type was a panoply and a stimulant to my sorely-taxed spirit. Sheer gratitude should have bound me to them as a co-worker.
When men like Peter and John Ballantine—than whom God never made a nobler pair of brothers—and Edgar Farmer—all the busiest of men—would go out of their way, in business hours, to make a special call upon me, after the news of a battle had set the town on fire with excitement, to “hope,” in brotherly solicitude, that “this does not mean a heartache for you?”—when the safety of my brothers, and the welfare of my parents, was the subject of affectionate inquiry, whenever we met friend or acquaintance connected with church or parish, I used to say to my husband and myself, that the world had never seen more truly chivalrous natures than those of these practical Middle States men, who never thought of themselves as knightly.