CAMDEN, S. C, April 20, 1861.—Home again at Mulberry. In those last days of my stay in Charleston I did not find time to write a word. And so we took Fort Sumter, nous autres; we–Mrs. Frank Hampton, and others–in the passageway of the Mills House between the reception-room and the drawing room, for there we held a sofa against all comers. All the agreeable people South seemed to have flocked to Charleston at the first gun. That was after we had found out that bombarding did not kill anybody. Before that, we wept and prayed and took our tea in groups in our rooms, away from the haunts of men.
Captain Ingraham and his kind also took Fort Sumter–from the Battery with field-glasses and figures made with their sticks in the sand to show what ought to be done.
Wigfall, Chesnut, Miles, Manning, took it rowing about the harbor in small boats from fort to fort under the enemy’s guns, with bombs bursting in air.
And then the boys and men who worked those guns so faithfully at the forts–they took it, too, in their own way.
Old Colonel Beaufort Watts told me this story and many more of the jeunesse dorée under fire. They took the fire easily, as they do most things. They had cotton bag bomb-proofs at Fort Moultrie, and when Anderson’s shot knocked them about some one called out “Cotton is falling.” Then down went the kitchen chimney, loaves of bread flew out, and they cheered gaily, shouting, “Breadstuffs are rising.”
Willie Preston fired the shot which broke Anderson’s flag-staff. Mrs. Hampton from Columbia telegraphed him, “Well done, Willie!” She is his grandmother, the wife, or widow, of General Hampton, of the Revolution, and the mildest, sweetest, gentlest of old ladies. This shows how the war spirit is waking us all up.
Colonel Miles (who won his spurs in a boat, so William Gilmore Simms ¹ said) gave us this characteristic anecdote. They met a negro out in the bay rowing toward the city with some plantation supplies, etc. “Are you not afraid of Colonel Anderson’s cannon?” he was asked. “No, sar, Mars Anderson ain’t daresn’t hit me; he know Marster wouldn’t ‘low it.”
I have been sitting idly to-day looking out upon this beautiful lawn, wondering if this can be the same world I was in a few days ago. After the smoke and the din of the battle, a calm.
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¹ William Gilmore Simms, the Southern novelist, was born in Charleston in 1806. He was the author of a great many volumes dealing with Southern life, and at one time they were widely read.