“The most pitiable sight I ever beheld.”

The Eighth Toast: To The Confederate Dead Of The University
********

North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial

www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial Commission"
Johnston’s Troops at Chapel Hill – 1865

“My very young eyes saw [General] Joseph E. Johnston’s army pass through the old college town of Chapel Hill; Sherman was hanging on its rear. As I stood by the side of the road with my mother, my hand in hers, I was too young to see what my eyes saw, “the most pitiable sight I ever beheld,” she always said. I did not know what it all meant, but I probably wondered why there were so many horses in one place and why so many of them were limping. The end of the war was near, Lee had surrendered, and Johnston’s surrender was only a matter of days. Ragged uniforms and barefooted men told the story. The limping horses belonged to General Joe Wheeler’s cavalry.

After my father was captured and taken to prison on Lake Erie, my mother and I went to live with Uncle John and Aunt Nancy, an elderly couple without children, on the Fred Hargrave plantation, situated a mile from Chapel Hill in a crotch made by the roads from Durham and from Raleigh as they approached the village.

The Hargrave Negroes still lived in their cabins and still put in crops of corn and cotton as they had always done. Lincoln’s Proclamation had freed them many months before, but they did not know what to do with their freedom; they did not know where to go or how to get there; so they stood in their tracks, waiting for the future to turn its page.

One warm day [little Betsy Toler] sat under a tree fanning herself…[and] a Negro boy came running in from the field, scarcely touching the furrows as he came. When he got in the yard, he spluttered, “Yankees! The Yankees are coming!” Betsy, out of the corner of her eye catching sight of a blue column, rushed to the house…landed in her feather bed, rolling it over as a covering, and disappeared from sight.

A group of troopers – commonly called Sherman’s bummers – straggled away from the column, rode into our yard, and began rummaging through the house without ceremony. As they went up the stairs, their swords rattled against the steps – clank, clank, clank.

The first room they entered was Betsy’s. They jerked off the feather bed; there she lay fully swathed: “Come here boys; here’s the dying Confederacy.” With a loud laugh they stalked into the next room. They snatched me up asleep in a crib and ran their hands under the little mattress; they were too late as Uncle John had already done the collecting and had buried the silver out in the orchard, covering the spot over carefully with leaves.

After the crops had been laid by on the Hargrave plantation, we moved back to Chapel Hill and went to live in the house on Rosemary Street where I was born. [Here] my father had kissed [my mother] for the first time; here they were married, and here I first opened my eyes; it was in this house he said a lingering goodbye when he put on his uniform; now we awaited his return from a Northern prison.” Read more at: http://www.ncwbts150.com/Test5.php

(Son of Carolina, Augustus White Long, Duke University Press, 1939, pp. 4-11)

********

The girls of St. Mary's met them as they passed and gave what they could. Every generation of my family has been represented there and my mother was almost kicked out because she walked across the street in front of the campus with a male cousin, but unescorted!:) I have letters from my grandfather who had to pull all sorts of strings to keep her in.