Dawson's Fall

by Roxana Robinson

  It was long after nine when we got there, and my first act was to look around the deserted house. What a scene of confusion! Armoirs spread open, with clothes tumbled in every direction, inside, and out, ribbons, laces on floors, chairs overturned, my desk wide open covered with letters, trinkets, etc; bureau drawers half out, the bed filled with odds and ends of everything. I no longer recognized my little room. On the bolster was a little box, at the sight of which I burst out laughing. Five minutes before the alarm, Miriam had been selecting those articles she meant to take to Greenwell, and holding up her box, said “If we were forced to run for our lives with out a moment’s warning, I’d risk my life to save this, rather than leave it!” Yet here lay the box, and she was safe at Greenwell! It took me two hours to pack father’s papers, then I packed Miriam’s trunk, then some of mother’s, and mine, listening all the while for the report of a cannon; for men were constantly tramping past the house, and only on condition our guerrillas did not disturb them, had they promised not to recommence the shelling. Charlie went out to hear the news, and I packed alone.

  It seems the only thing that saved the town, was two gentlemen who rowed out to the ships, and informed the illustrious commander that there were no men there to be hurt, and he was only killing women and children. The answer was “he was sorry he had hurt them; he thought of course the town had been evacuated before the men were fools enough to fire on them, and had only shelled the principal streets to intimidate the people!” Those streets, were the very ones crowded with flying women and children, which they must have seen with their own eyes …

  So ended the momentous shelling of Baton Rouge, during which the valiant Faragut killed one whole woman, wounded three, struck some twenty houses several times a piece, and indirectly caused the death of two little children who were drowned in their flight, one poor little baby who was born in the woods … There were many similar cases. Hurrah for the illustrious Farragut, the “Woman Killer!!!”

  It was three o’clock before I left off packing, and took refuge in a tub of cold water … Tiche was thoughtful enough to provide it;… we found her safe at home, having lost all trace of us, preparing to start on foot to Greenwell in the morning. What a luxury the water was! and when I changed my underclothes, I felt like a new being. To be sure I pulled off the skin of my heel entirely, where it had been blistered by the walk, dust, sun, etc, but that was a trifle … For three hours I dreamed of rifled shells and battles, and at half past six, I was up and at work again. Mother came soon after, and after hard work, we got safely off at three, saving nothing but our clothes and silver. All else is gone. It cost me a pang to leave my guitar, and Miriam’s piano, but … there was no help for it …

  It was dark night when we reached here. A bright fire was blazing in front, but the house looked so desolate, that I wanted to cry. Miriam cried when I told her her piano was left behind. Supper was a new sensation, after having been without any thing except a glass of clabber … and a piece of bread since half past six. I laid down on the hard floor … thankful that I was so fortunate as to be able to lie down at all. In my dozing state, I heard the wagon come, and Miriam ordering a mattress to be put in the room for me …

  She and Lucy made a bed and rolled me in it with no more questions.

  July 20, 1862

  If I was a man—! O wouldn’t I be in Richmond with the boys!…

  Why was I not a man? what is the use of all these worthless women, in war times? If they attack, I shall don the breeches, and join the assailants, and fight … How do breeches and coats feel, I wonder? I am actually afraid of them. I kept a suit of Jimmy’s hanging in the armoir for six weeks waiting for the Yankees to come, thinking fright would give me courage to try it, (what a seeming paradox!) but I never succeeded. Lilly one day insisted on my trying it, and I advanced so far as to lay it on the bed, and then carried my bird out—I was ashamed to let even my canary see me—but when I took a second look, my courage deserted me, and there ended my first and last attempt at disguise. I have heard so many girls boast of having worn men’s clothes; I wonder where they get the courage.

  9.

  1864. Brother Philip Hicky’s house, 178 Camp Street, New Orleans

  SARAH MORGAN’S DIARY

  February 1864

  Friday the fifth, as I was running through Miriam’s room, I saw Brother pass the door, and heard him ask Miriam for mother. The voice, the bowed head, the look of utter despair on his face, struck through me like a knife. “Gibbes! Gibbes!” was my sole thought; but Miriam and I stood motionless looking at each other without a word. “Gibbes is dead!” said mother as he stood before her. He did not speak; and then we went in.

  We did not ask how, or when. That he was dead was enough for us. But after a while he told us uncle James had written that he had died at two o’clock on Thursday the twenty first. Still we did not know how he had died. Several letters that had been brought remained unopened on the floor. One, Brother opened … It was from Col. Steedman to Miriam and me, written a few hours after his death, and contained the sad story of our dear brother’s last hours. He had been in Col. Steedman’s ward of the hospital for more than a week, with headache and sore throat; but it was thought nothing; he seemed to improve, and expected to be discharged in a few days. On the twenty first he complained that his throat pained him again. After prescribing for him, and talking cheerfully with him for some time, Col. Steedman left him surrounded by his friends, to attend to his other patients. He had hardly reached his room when someone ran to him saying Capt. Morgan was dying. He hurried to his bedside, and found him dead. Capt. Steedman [the colonel’s brother], sick in the next bed, and those around him said he had been talking pleasantly with them, when he sat up to reach his cup of water on the table. As soon as he drank it he seemed to suffocate; and after tossing his arms wildly in the air, and making several fearful efforts to breathe, he died.

  O Gibbes! Gibbes! When you took me in your arms and cried so bitterly over that sad parting, it was indeed your last farewell! My brothers! my brothers! Dear Lord how can we live without our boys?…

  On Thursday the eleventh, as we sat talking to mother, striving to make her forget the weary days we had cried through with that fearful sound of dead! dead! ringing ever in our ears, some one asked for Miriam. She went down, and presently I heard her thanking some body for a letter. “You could not have brought me anything more acceptable! It is from my sister, though she can hardly have heard from us yet!” I ran back, and sitting at mother’s feet, told her Miriam was coming with a letter from Lydia [Gibbes’s wife]. Mother cried at the mention of her name. O my little sister! you know how dear you are to us!

  “Mother! Mother!” a horrible voice cried, and before I could think who it was, Miriam rushed in holding an open letter in her hand, and perfectly wild. “George is dead!” she shrieked and fell heavily to the ground. O my God! I could have prayed thee to take mother too, when I looked at her! I thought—I almost hoped she was dead, and that pang spared! But I was wild myself. I could have screamed!—laughed! “It is false! do you hear me mother? God would not take both! George is not dead!” I cried trying in vain to rouse her from her horrible state or bring one ray of reason to her eye. I spoke to a body alive only to pain; not a sound of my voice seemed to reach her; only fearful moans showed she was yet alive. Miriam lay raving on the ground. Poor Miriam! her heart’s idol torn away. God help my darling! I did not understand that George could die until I looked at her. In vain I strove to raise her from the ground, or check her wild shrieks for death. “George! only George!” she would cry; until at last with the horror of seeing both die before me, I mastered strength enough to go for the servant and bid her run quickly for Brother.

  How long I stood there alone, I never knew. I remember Ada coming in hurriedly and asking what it was. I told her George was dead. It was a relief to see her cry. I could not; but I felt the pain afresh, as though it were her brother she was crying over, not mine. And the sight of her tears b
rought mine too. We could only cry over mother and Miriam; we could not rouse them; we did not know what to do …

  Miriam had been taken to her room more dead than alive—mother lay speechless in hers. The shock of this second blow had obliterated, with them, all recollection of the first. It was a mercy I envied them; for I remembered both until loss of consciousness would have seemed a blessing. I shall never forget mother’s shriek of horror when towards evening she recalled it …

  How will the world seem to us now? What will life be without the boys?

  10.

  1865. Richmond, Virginia

  WHEN THE WAR ENDED he was in Richmond. He’d been wounded again, shot in the shoulder and taken from the field to someone’s house. He was lying in a darkened room when he heard people shouting in the streets. The light burned in fiery lines through the closed shutters. He heard sporadic gunshots, the grinding of wagon wheels. He listened, trying to tell who was winning. Dogs barked. A woman called, “Where are you?” He raised his head, but couldn’t see through the shutters.

  He thought the city had fallen, but it was the Confederacy. The South.

  * * *

  DAWSON HAD TO his name a three-cent postage stamp and a five-dollar bill, sent by a friend in Baltimore. His Confederate money was worthless. He changed the bill into coins, so it would seem like more. The first luxuries he bought were cigars and oranges.

  He looked for any kind of job: driving a dray, bookkeeping, agent for an express company. He and a friend started a newspaper, but what they wrote offended the federal officers, who closed it down. When Mr. Raines offered him the job of managing his plantation in Sussex County, Dawson accepted. He knew little about running a plantation, but he was sure he could learn, and this place had been his second home during the war. Captain Pegram had introduced him to old Mr. Raines, who was the son of an Englishman. He’d opened his house and his heart to Dawson, treating him like a son, providing him with horses, money, and a home. Dawson accepted the job. He was in Richmond saying goodbye when someone handed him a telegram. It was an offer to work at the Daily Richmond Examiner.

  Henry Rives Pollard was the editor then. He was lazy, vain, and dissolute. Also belligerent. He was inclined to threaten people with shootings, and used Dawson as his second. Offended by an article in another paper, Pollard told Dawson to get his pistol and find the editor so Pollard could whip him. Dawson found the man at the capitol, in the Rotunda. Pollard waited outside and jumped him when the man came out. Both drew pistols and fired, though no one was hit. There were other incidents: he threatened to horsewhip someone from The New York Times.

  Later, after Dawson left, Pollard published an article about the elopement of a Miss Grant. Her brother, James Grant, took exception. To defend his sister’s honor he waited in a window that Pollard passed on his way to work. When Pollard walked by Grant opened fire with a double-barreled shotgun. Pollard was dead by the time he hit the sidewalk. Grant was acquitted. Everyone agreed that he had provocation.

  While he was working at the Examiner Dawson met Bartholomew Riordan. He was the opposite of Pollard, a slim, quiet, modest man, astute, intelligent, and enterprising. He hadn’t fought in the war (he was slightly lame) but had been a journalist. For a while he’d worked for the Charleston Mercury. He thought that city needed a first-rate newspaper, and that he and Dawson should provide it. He went first.

  In the fall of 1866 Dawson became assistant editor at the Charleston Mercury. This belonged to the Rhetts, father and son from an old Charleston family. Old R. B. Rhett, and Colonel R. B. Rhett, Jr., were Fire-Eaters: secessionists and ferocious supporters of the Confederacy. The South was full of people like the Rhetts: still angry at the North, contemptuous of the Union, committed to the “Lost Cause.” Why wouldn’t they be? They’d lost everything, their way of life, their economy, their power and presence, the knowledge that they were at the center of the world.

  Dawson, only twenty-six years old and a foreigner, went in one day to tell his boss, old Mr. Rhett, that the Mercury should tell its readers to swallow the Fourteenth Amendment. They should swallow the fact that Negroes were citizens, and could vote. Dawson told Rhett it would save misery later. Also, he said, it would be the making of the paper. Rhett was so angry—pink creeping up his neck from his collar—he could hardly speak. He nearly fired Dawson on the spot.

  Swallow this? They’d been at the center of the world. The huge engine of the Southern economy had supplied the entire world with something essential: cheap cotton. It had superseded the Silk Road and it had flooded the European markets. American cotton was king everywhere.

  The North, ignorant and hypocritical, had destroyed this empire. Hadn’t the North been involved in the slave trade, and benefited from it? Yes, it had. The North had no moral authority; it had no business provoking this war.

  And yet it had. The North had invaded their territory and burned their houses and run off their stock. The North had killed hundreds of thousands of their good boys, who would never come back. The North had destroyed their plantations and their economy and their families: everything of value. The North had humiliated them in the eyes of the world, and for that the South would never forgive it.

  The North became even more the enemy as the South watched their own slow slide downward. The South saw themselves turning to shadows, as if now their lives had become their own negatives in the photographs. Their great beautiful edifice had turned dark and empty, their eyes had gone white, their details blurred. They were no longer at the center of the world.

  The South seethed. The war was over, and Northerners were leaving their lands, but they could take out their rage on the Negroes.

  That fall Riordan and Dawson bought controlling interest in the failing Charleston News. In the first issue they announced: “The new proprietors of the paper will bend all their energies honestly, fearlessly and consistently with but the single aim—to maintain the honor and promote the welfare of the Southern people.”

  PART II

  11.

  The Late Affray in Yorkville.

  The ladies of the Presbyterian Church got up a Christmas tree and party … for the benefit of the Sunday school. During its progress some things were thrown back and forward from the window and the street, which … led to a quarrel and a street fight, which ended in the death of one young man and severely [sic] stabbing of another … It seems that a piece of wood, thrown from the window, struck both [Thos.] Smith and [Wm.] Snyder, which irritated them—also that stones … thrown into the window … irritated the young men in the hall … Harsh words were used. After the … party, Smith and Snyder, with several others, waited for Mr. D. Jones … and demanded that he should retract what he said, which he would not do. They then attacked him … [Jones] drew his knife … The scuffle continued for only a few moments, when both Smith and Snyder exclaimed that they were cut, and ran to Dr. Jackson’s room, where Smith died … his throat being cut in a most frightful manner.

  None of the parties were intoxicated … [Everyone] sympathizes with the families of the three young men, they being … steady and orderly boys.

  —CHARLESTON MERCURY, JANUARY 2, 1868

  12.

  A “SOUTHERN DIFFICULTY.”

  Terrible Tragedy Yesterday in Columbia, S.C.—A Free Fight, Fisticuffs and Then Deadly Shooting—The Wrong Man Killed, of Course—The Principals Unhurt.

  Judge S. W. Melton, one of the most prominent native republicans in the State, who was nominated for the Attorney Generalship … has recently been designated in a published card as a liar, poltroon and coward by C. W. Montgomery, Senator from Newberry county, and now President of the Senate pro tem.

  Melton … took no notice of these foul aspersions further than to indicate that he would settle all such difficulties after the election … [I]t was known Melton, true to his chivalric antecedents, would not fail to resent an insult even at the risk of his life. The dénouement proved that the latter was the case …

  Melton had accuse
d Montgomery … of issuing fraudulent pay certificates …

  Thus matters rested until this evening, when Montgomery and a gentleman named George Tupper were in the dining saloon of the Pollock House awaiting dinner … Judge Melton, who had been upstairs, came down, and, looking into the dining room, saw his foe Montgomery.

  Melton was accompanied by John D. Caldwell … and Major Morgan, son-in-law of George A. Trenholm, late Secretary of the Confederate Treasury … Judge Melton rushed upon Montgomery, who was seated at the dining table, and … began a most vigorous pummelling of his physiognomy. In a moment all the parties present jumped to their feet, and soon the room was a confused mass of scuffling men. Caldwell and Morgan sprung forward, and endeavored to separate the combatants.

  The excitement at this juncture was very great, the two principal parties being still clinched, when two pistol shots were heard, and Caldwell, pressing his hands to his sides, fell dead upon the floor. Scarcely had this happened when Morgan received a shot in the shoulder and exclaimed, “I’m shot.”

  —NEW YORK HERALD, SEPTEMBER 22, 1872

  September 1872. Hampton’s Plantation, outside Columbia, South Carolina

  THE PLANTATION LAY four miles outside Columbia, along the Congaree River.