Part 7

When the division crossed the Blackwater and marched on to Suffolk I went to the home of my aunt, Mrs. Eley, at Barber's Cross Roads, a distance of about ten miles from Suffolk. Here when all was quiet along the lines my Soldier would ride in from his headquarters almost every night between the hours of sunset and sunrise to see me--a ride of about thirty miles. While these short visits were glimpses of heaven to me, they resulted sadly for my aunt, whose house, in consequence, was burned by the Federals.

At the earnest solicitation of my Soldier, who feared my remaining within the enemy's lines, I went to an old friend in Richmond, Mrs. Shields, the wife of Colonel Shields. When on this visit I first met General "Jeb" Stuart, the "Red Fox" of the Confederacy, thus named because of the blonde glory of his coloring and the swiftness of his movements, as well as his wiliness in evading pursuit. He was said to be one of the handsomest men in the South, and perhaps it was true, but I was at that time too much absorbed in the contemplation of the, to me, handsomest man in the _world_ to have discriminating eyes for the beauty of anyone else.

Among those of our officers most noted for personal attractions was General Longstreet, who was thought to resemble "Jeb" in appearance. A story is told of an ardent admirer of the "Red Fox" who, meeting the "old War Horse," General Longstreet, said, "General Stuart, I just met a man who told me of mistaking you for General Longstreet, but I don't see how he could. Longstreet is not half as handsome as you are." General Longstreet gravely replied, "Yes, I am sometimes taken for Longstreet."

As we danced at a ball at "Yellow Tavern" General Stuart teasingly commiserated my Soldier on his bad luck in belonging to the infantry.

"I am sorry for Pickett, poor fellow! He has to walk. Upon my word, he ought to be in the cavalry. He deserves it. What a pity! And you, Miss Lassie--why should you throw yourself away on the infantry? _You_ ought to marry a cavalryman."

I tried to defend myself and set forth the greater advantages of the infantry service.

"Pickett is lucky," he replied, "in having such a champion. I am in love with him myself and agree with you perfectly, for Pickett can do anything. When I see him dance I think he ought to be a dancing-master. When I see him ride I think he ought to be a cavalry leader. When he whistles I think he ought to be a bird. When he sings it seems that he ought to be an opera star. When I see him lead a charge I feel that he ought to spend his life on the battlefield. Yes, Pickett can do anything and do it well. As for poor me--all I can do is to make love."

Inexperienced as I was, I knew that the "Red Fox" could do everything that was brave and fine and great. As for making love--there was only one who knew his power in that art--the lovely woman who possessed all his gallant heart and has worthily borne his great name through years of wearing toil and lonely sorrow.

In the battle or on the road a song or a laugh was always on his lips and the hearts of his men leaped up to meet his gayety as well as his fearlessness.

To few men is it given to go through a great war untouched by any ball except the fatal one. Such was the gift that Mars bestowed upon his brilliant follower and in less than a year from that festive night at this same Yellow Tavern the blood-red seal was set upon a youth that was immortal.

XV

THE SMUGGLED BRIDE

Notwithstanding war and war's alarms, when I should be launched into the world with a diploma in my hand and the blessings of my Alma Mater on my head my Soldier was to marry me. Cupid does not readily give way to Mars, and in our Southern country a lull between bugle calls was likely to be filled with the music of wedding bells. But Mars was in the ascendant for the time, and when I was graduated the Army of Northern Virginia was marching to an undetermined battlefield in Pennsylvania.

Then came Gettysburg, and the wave of triumph set rolling at Fredericksburg and mounting higher at Chancellorsville surged anew, for the first news that came to us was of a great victory. So we rode on the flood-tide of fancied success and fell with the ebb.

Soon after the battle my Soldier returned to recruit his division. On Sunday we walked down Broad Street to the Monumental Episcopal Church. It was the first time we had gone to church together and he was telling me that this church was called the Monumental because it was built upon the site of the old Richmond theater, burned in 1811. My Soldier's grandmother was a victim of the fire, as were the Governor of Virginia and more than sixty of Richmond's best known citizens. The fire and the long funeral procession had been described to him by those who held in memory the mournful cortège darkening the streets of the beautiful city as Death had clouded the lives of the thousands who followed their loved ones for the last time on earth.

As we went down Broad Street Hill we saw a little Hebrew child standing first on one foot and then on the other, crying. He had rubbed his dirty hands on his tear-stained face until it was covered with muddy streaks.

"Come, come, my little man, what is the matter?" asked my Soldier.

"My shoes is a hurtin' an' pinchin' me so. They feels like I was a walkin' on red-hot corncobs. Oh-oh-oh! Mister, I can't walk; I can't get anywhere at all."

Kneeling, my Soldier unlaced and took off the shoes, rubbed the little feet, tied the shoes together, handed them to the boy, and with his own clean handkerchief wiped away the tears. Lifting the child in his arms he carried him home, some three blocks farther on. We went our way and as I walked beside my Soldier in his gray uniform cloaked with the glory and the gloom of the world's greatest battle, I felt prouder of the simple sweet nature offering sympathy and aid to "one of the least of these" than of all the valor of the soldier on the field.

Only a few days before he had ridden from Gettysburg to Richmond, cheer after cheer following him along the way. Men, women and children were at the roadside to welcome him and hang garlands on his horse. He had been the central figure in a scene so supreme that it needed not victory to crown it with glory. Yet not the flowers of love nor the echo of the cannon's thunder, the grave duties nor the heavy sorrows that were laid upon him, could so fill his heart as to leave no room for the cry of suffering from an unknown child.

In September of that year my Soldier married me. He had confided in General Longstreet and asked for a furlough. The Corps Commander replied that they were not granting furloughs. "But," he said, with that twinkle in his eye so well remembered by all who knew General Lee's "old War Horse," "I might detail you for special duty and you could stop off and be married." So my Soldier was detailed for "special duty."

Unfortunately, the Federals south of the line were at that time worshipping exclusively at the shrine of Mars. For them Cupid was absolutely dethroned. So much opposed were they to our marriage and so insistent in their efforts to induce my Soldier to pay them a prolonged visit instead of wasting his time in wedding frivolities that it became necessary for me to cross the lines. This I did with the assistance of my uncle, Doctor John T. Phillips, who took my father and me under his protection, smuggled us across, my father driving a load of fodder in which my trunks were concealed. My mother could not leave my little baby brother, now Dr. Edwin F. Corbell, an eminent and beloved physician of North Carolina, to go with me, so I was accompanied by one of her friends as chaperon. I quaked inwardly when we met some Federal cavalrymen but kept up a brave front and, recognizing Dr. Phillips, the riders allowed his permit to cover the party and we passed on our way.

At Waverley Station we were met by my uncle, Colonel J. J. Phillips, and his wife, and by my Soldier's brother and aunt and uncle, Miss Olivia and Mr. Andrew Johnston. With them we went on to Petersburg and on September 15, 1863, in St. Paul's Church, the marriage took place. We left for Richmond amid the salute of guns, hearty cheers, the chimes of bells and the music of bands and bugles.

As by that time the food supply of the South was reduced to narrow limits, salt being procured by digging up and boiling the earth from under the smokehouses, browned sweet potatoes cut into bits and toasted serving for coffee, and lumps of sugar being sold at high prices for the hospital fund, it might be thought that our prospect of finding a banquet awaiting us in Richmond was not brilliant. But friends and relations of my Soldier had exerted themselves to do him honor, and the result was such as had not been seen in Virginia for many a day. It was sora season and so generous was the supply that the feast was afterward known as the "wedding sora-supper." The birds had been killed at night with paddles, for the South was not wasting her small store of ammunition on sora with so many more important targets in sight. The birds, killed at Curl's Neck on the James River, and thousands of beaten biscuit, gallons of terrapin stew, and turkeys boned and made into salad by the neighbors and the old plantation servants under the supervision of Mr. and Mrs. Sims, the overseer and his wife at Turkey Island, my Soldier's old colonial home, were sent us as bridal presents. Mrs. Robert E. Lee's gift was a fruit-cake, the making of which she had superintended, and Bishop Dudley's mother sent us a black fruit-cake that had been put away for her own golden wedding.

The only men in civilian evening dress were Mr. Davis and his Cabinet and a few ministers and very old men, for even then we were "robbing the cradle and the grave" to recruit the Army, and the women were sacrificing everything to help. Through kindness of friends in Norfolk a handsome bridal dress, imported for me by Mrs. Boykin, had been smuggled across the line. It was so unusual that after Mrs. Davis had greeted me she looked in astonishment at my costume and said:

"Child, where did you get these clothes?"

Turning to the General, smiling, Mr. Davis asked:

"Where did you get the little lady in the clothes?"

On the other side of the room was the editor of the _Richmond Examiner_, who had been mercilessly assailing the administration. Mrs. Davis called her husband's attention to him but Mr. Davis said:

"Let us not look that way, my dear. We have come to-night to see beautiful things and think pleasant thoughts."

The General's sister invited the President and Mrs. Davis to the dining-room.

"What a time you must have had plucking them," said Mr. Davis when he saw the sora.

"A part of the gift was the preparation of them, even to the last shade of brownness."

My memory of Mr. Davis that evening lingers with special significance because it was the last time that I ever saw real happiness in his earnest face. He was just a free, gallant gentleman that night. As he said, he had come to enjoy. Clouds, public and private, were gathering, and soon enough there was no longer the possibility of forgetting. I saw him often afterward in sadness, but never again with the light of joy on his face.

Perhaps there was never anywhere else so varied a collection of curios for the adornment of the person as I had assembled for a trousseau. I had gowns remodeled from court robes more than a century old, relics of grandmothers and great-grandmothers; frocks of home-woven material, striped with vegetable dyes gathered from the woods, and trimmed with a passementerie made of various kinds of seeds, such as canteloupe, laces knit from fine-spun flax, tatting and crocheted trimmings, and buttons carved from peach-stones.

One of my bonnets was made of the lacy lining that grows on the inside of a gourd, called my dish-cloth bonnet because the soft fabric was used also for the less ornamental kitchen purpose. In the absence of the more widely known varieties of millinery I used the silky milkweed balls for white roses and made bunches of grapes from picked cotton covered with fleek-skin and tinted. A bonnet of gray straw, plaited and dyed by the servants, poke-shaped and with pink roses inside the brim, was especially becoming. My bridal present from my pastor's wife was a very wide collar of tatting and embroidery.

The wedding robe left nothing to be desired, for it was of white satin and exquisite shimmering lace, made at a center of fashion. In passing I may remark that the possession of a real wedding dress, new and stylish, was a distinction that carried with it a sense of obligation to the community at large, and my bridal gown graced a number of weddings after my own. It was last worn by one of the most beautiful girls of the Confederacy who, a few days later, exchanged its snowy folds for the sables of widowhood when the bridegroom was brought home dead from the battlefield. Thus tragically shadowed the dress around which clustered so many happy memories, so many tender sentiments, and so many sorrowful recollections, was laid away with reverent hands, never again to glimmer with soft sheen through the misty folds of the bridal veil.

XVI

BUTLER BOTTLED UP

My Soldier was at this time assigned to the Department of North Carolina, with headquarters at Petersburg, Virginia, commanding all that part of Virginia between James River on the north and Cape Fear River on the south, reaching eastward to the Federal lines around Suffolk and westward to the Black Water and Chowan, including all the troops in that region.

After our bridal visits to kinspeople we returned to Petersburg where we found that our friends, in spite of the restrictions of war, had arranged beautiful rooms for us, decorating them luxuriantly with flowers and fitting them up handsomely.

Among the many who helped to make my life happy in Petersburg was Major Charles Pickett, the General's Assistant Adjutant General (the "Little Major," as he was affectionately called by the soldiers). When my Soldier introduced him to me as his "little brother" he immediately became my "little brother," too, and thus he was in my life and my heart through all the years that he remained on earth. He walked slightly lame from a wound received at Frazier's Farm. So anxious was he to get into the fight that he disobeyed orders to report for staff duty in Richmond and went into the battle instead. When he was shot he begged his comrades not to carry him off the field but to leave him his flag that he might die under its folds. But he lived through what was known among the men as "the battle the little Major fought down at Frazier's Farm," and thus I came into possession of "my little brother." Soon afterward he married Miss Elizabeth Smith of Washington, and brought us a dear sister who was my companion in the rare sunshine and the many storms of war.

All this region was historic and held thrilling memories of the battles of bygone days. As we rode over the ground we talked of the old-time conflicts and my Soldier said that he would have been glad to be in all wars that were for a just cause. I had been taught that the Mexican war was without such justification, and asked his opinion.

"At West Point," he replied, "some of us were reprimanded for expressing a doubt of its justice. I was one of them. After we were in we had to fight it out and as it must be done I wanted to do my share."

It was while my Soldier was stationed at Petersburg that the expedition to North Carolina was projected, involving Newbern and Plymouth. The military history of the movement is given in "Pickett and His Men," but there are certain personal features of the expedition which have been recorded in my memory, for I would not be left behind when the journey to the old North State was made. I went as far as the house of a friend on the Newbern road.

The night was bleak and frigid; we were nearing our stopping place. My Soldier, always solicitous for his men, was discussing with his staff the discomfort to which they would be subjected and the impossibility of alleviating their suffering.

"Poor fellows!" he said. "They will be almost frozen and no wood, and General Lee will not allow us to burn even a single rail. There will be the devil to pay and I powerless to help."

Observing that I had awakened and heard his last remark he turned reprovingly to Captain Bright, saying:

"Bright, how dare you use that gentleman's name in the presence of my wife?"

"Beg your pardon, Sister," said Captain Bright, "I thought you were asleep."

Whatever relation my Soldier might bear to his staff officers, I was always "Sister."

"Don't you think I know your voice, my dear, from Captain Bright's?" I inquired.

"No, little one, you could not possibly know my voice in connection with such words, and you could not think that I would use such language as Bright uses."

"Sister," said Captain Bright, "before the General was married he would not allow any of us to swear at all. He said he would do the swearing for the whole division. Now that he is married we have not only to do all our own swearing but his, too."

Had it not been for the versatile imagination of Colonel Floweree, the Ananias of the Seventh Virginia Regiment, my Soldier and I would probably have fared badly. The hotel was impossible and the community was of Union sentiment. In our connection with the Southern Army we could expect no toleration. In this dilemma Colonel Floweree undertook to grapple with the situation. He learned that the most beautiful and luxurious home in the village was owned by an old Baptist, a power in the church and in the community, who was known to be not unwilling to make an occasional sacrifice of political opinions to religious fraternity. Colonel Floweree called upon the good brother and, with an intonation that he could have learned nowhere but from the pious and hardshell Baptists of that region and period, said:

"My dear Brother, I know what a good Baptist you are and how ready you are to help all your brethren in the Lord. I have my good General, Brother Pickett, out here with his dear pious wife, Sister Pickett, both good Baptists, and I beg you to extend to them the hospitality of your home and entertain them as best you can for the sake of brotherly love."

"If I do," said the old man hesitatingly, "the Yankees may burn my house; but I must take the chances, I cannot let my brethren suffer. Yes, let the good brother and sister come in and share what I have."

We were received with fraternal hospitality, our host shaking hands with us solemnly, saying, "How do you do, Brother Pickett? How are you, Sister Pickett?" in a voice that invested us with the sanctity of the church.

I was interested to observe that our host had but one eye, his wife was cross-eyed, and their daughter was cock-eyed. These optical phenomena were afterward scientifically explained by our Baptist brother.

"I was engaged to a cross-eyed girl," he said, "and my people objected to the marriage. I was about to give it up when one day I was cutting wood and the end of the stick flew up and hit me in the eye and put it out. It was the judgment of the Lord and I repented and married my cross-eyed girl. Then when our girl was born the hand of the accusing angel touched her and she was cock-eyed to keep me in mind of my sin."

Petersburg, the gate to Richmond, was the weakest point of the Confederacy, and my Soldier had explained its position to the authorities in Richmond and asked that provision for its defense should be made. His warning disregarded, he wrote a confidential letter on the subject to General Lee, who sent an officer to Richmond, urging immediate action. Still nothing was done and when, on the 5th of May, Butler with thirty thousand troops moved upon the town, which was defended by only six hundred men (two hundred of whom were ineffective), the government and the country were as much surprised as if they had never heard of the danger.

Though my Soldier had been ordered a few days before to report to the Army of Northern Virginia, he could not leave Petersburg to destruction. In defiance of orders he remained in the beleaguered city. The day after the attack a part of the South Carolina brigade came in and, being placed at Walthall Junction, about six miles from Petersburg, drove back Butler's advance column. Wise's Virginia brigade arrived on the seventh and was sent toward City Point. Then three brigades of Pickett's division began coming in as fast as the crippled express could bring them, and we had eleven pieces of artillery.

We women carried the dispatches, cooked the food and took it to the men at the guns. At train time we would go to the station and send up cheer after cheer of welcome, hoping to blind the Federals to the fact that the cars, returning from their short trip to the country, brought in only the half-starved railroad men. The roar of cannon and the shrieks of shot and shell filled our ears day and night. During the entire week, until Petersburg was safe and General Grant had sent his famous telegram to Mr. Lincoln, "Pickett has bottled up Butler at Petersburg," my Soldier scarcely slept, and I saw him only when I carried to him on the lines a dispatch or his bread and soup and coffee. This telegram so angered Butler that he came up the James River, out of the line of battle, at great expense to the United States Government, and sacked and burned my Soldier's beautiful ancestral home.

The city council of Petersburg voted a resolution of thanks to my Soldier for his brave defense of the city. The people wished to express their gratitude by a gift to me. It was impossible to buy a service of silver, so each brought a fork, a salt-spoon, a pitcher, as the case might be, until more than a thousand pieces were given to me. One woman, having no silver because she had been compelled to sell her household service, brought a pretty gilt-bordered cup. The gifts of affection were of far greater value to me than the most elegant and costly new set of silver could have been and were carefully cherished until, in the fire which marked the surrender of Richmond, they, with all my bridal presents and everything of value, were burned in the warehouse in Richmond where they had been placed for safe-keeping.

One morning in May in the early dawn we rode out of the city of sweet memories and days of terror, pausing to look back at the far-off Church of Saint Paul, new-lit by the rising sun, where we had plighted our troth.

XVII

ON THE LINES

Our next station was on the "Bermuda Hundred" lines near the heart of the storm, but there were rifts of sunshine to break the gloom.

A tent was our first home and later a log cabin. Major Charles Pickett's log cabin near our own had two rooms, a degree of splendor to which no one else attained.

We had friends--such friends as war binds together with links that can never be broken. The wives of many of the officers were there. The few new books we had were exchanged until they were read through and through and almost learned by heart. If one of us fortunately came into possession of a month-old paper it went the rounds and was more eagerly perused than are the morning journals now, just off the press with the news of the hour fresh and hot. We visited, walked, talked, rode and danced half the night away lest it should be over-long and bring darksome dreams. How could we live on the rim of a volcano if we could not dance around its crater?