Miss Confederation

by Anne McDonald

  We left Uncle Williams about 4 o’clock. He was very sorry to part with me and I was very sorry to leave. He coaxed me very much to stay all winter but Pa and Ma would not hear of it. Uncle and Aunt are coming down tomorrow morning to go with us to Warren. They are dear good people. It rained all the morning and I cd not go out. I wanted to go to see Frances and Annie Creighton. Aunt Mary’s [Haine] youngest boy is Charlie, just the size and age of our Charlie [born in 1859]. Clara is like Dina [Mercy’s sister Georgianna], [Ursula?] is like her father. There is only another boy at home, Johnny, not quite so big as Willie Dunkerton. Brothers George and William Haine are clerks in the War Department. George was expected today but he did not come.

  George Dunkerton is a very fine young man. He goes to school at Farmington. He will make a very fine young man.

  Uncle Dick Dunkerton is the jolliest old card I ever met. He said when we wanted to go early to Uncle William’s yesterday “I don’t want to go there before dinner is ready. I hate having to [unclear] waiting for my meals”. He had several bad pains after dinner and had to get a glass of punch. Indeed, since we have been in Bloomfield there is nothing but eating and drinking. We stay here at Aunt Elizabeth’s and leave from Warren tomorrow afternoon.

  November 9th, Wednesday night, Warren, Ohio

  We arrived here at 6 o’clock. They were very loath to part with us and it is a pity for we need not have left until tomorrow morning for there is a special train leaves at 12 o’clock. Pa thinks to go by the 9 o’clock train. Uncle William, Aunt Mary and George Dunkerton are here with us. William Haine arrived last night. He came down to Uncle Richard’s this morning with his wife and [unclear]. He looks very pale and very much as he looks in his likeness. I saw the whole connections but George Haine and Bertie Symes. [Unclear] Symes came to see us this morning. He is not the least like Bertie but seems a very nice person. Aunt Mary brought me a little bottle of honey for my throat. Last night I had a dose of [unclear]. Ma rubbed my throat outside with it and went off to bed. It is better today. They made me sing “Bonnie Blue Flag’s” lyric at Uncle William’s and that hurt my throat. Last night all the girls came down from Uncle William’s and we had such a jolly time. Uncle William wanted me to stay with him until this morning but Papa thought I had better go with he and Ma. Uncle just wanted me to go out with him and after I was ready and all, Pa said it was too damp and I had to take off my things again.

  Mercy’s uncle, William, wished her to stay the winter, stay overnight, go for a walk.… But each time, her parents said no. Mercy never says whether she wanted to or not. She does the things requested of her — gets ready for a walk, and then takes her things off again. She doesn’t express what she herself wants, though the fact that she writes of these offers makes one believe Mercy would have liked to take her uncle up on them.

  Staying for the winter would be something different, an opportunity away from Prince Edward Island, where she likely knew everyone, every bachelor, every possible match open to her. In Bloomfield, she’d have a much wider selection of possible mates, even if they were first cousins. Her parents, however, didn’t want her to stay, and, surprisingly, that was the end of that.

  Her parents were emphatic about her not staying for the winter, and “would not hear of it.” It could have been they were worried about her health. They’d taken care with her education and perhaps they thought Bloomfield would be too rural a life for her and would not offer enough opportunities, in life or for marriage. This is speculation though. Mercy gives no indication of why her parents say no.

  Mercy herself perhaps felt vulnerable after having been so sick, and was still not fully recovered. Life in Ohio would have been quite different, too — there were no servants, and it was a more rural existence. Maybe she didn’t want to stay, but she does sound disappointed. Even something as simple as going out for a walk with her uncle is quashed because her father feels it is too damp outside. This shows that her parents were still concerned for her health, but it also shows Mercy’s willingness to be directed by her parents. She is following the expectations society placed on young unmarried women.

  One wishes Mercy would have spoken up, said what she wanted, or at least made it clear in her diary. We want all her intelligence and her insight to be directed at herself. Writing a diary, in and of itself, shows a degree of independence, with one free to write personal thoughts, and Mercy had done so before. It would have been good if she had done so again. But it’s still 1864, and generally, women didn’t speak up, or have ambitions upon which they could act freely. The general approach to life was for a woman to subsume herself in her husband’s life. The aim was to marry. Even today, in the twenty-first century, one could argue that Western culture, with its emphasis on the princess as a role model for young girls, can tend to promote marriage and the domestic “epic” as the best of a woman’s life choices.

  Nevertheless, the diary stands as a testament to a young woman’s need to present and preserve a life. Mercy Coles kept writing, even while desperately ill. She maintained and preserved the original diary throughout her life. Likely all the mementos and “cartes” of her time at the conference events and tour of the Canadas on this momentous six-week journey that her obituary mentions were kept by her family, at least for a time. Mercy Coles recognized her diary as important, worthy of posterity. The diary is representative of, and a testament to, a young unmarried woman’s life and views at a seminal point in Canada’s history. It is, as well, of course, the only Canadian female account of the Confederation events.

  Mercy must have wanted to marry. She gave every indication she was interested in the men she met, and commented on their looks, their behaviour, and their attention toward her. Five weeks had gone by since Mercy and her parents left Prince Edward Island on October 5; time and opportunity for Mercy to be wooed were running out.

  * * *

  * Mercy’s uncle, William, was author Sue Hawkins Bell’s great-great-grandfather (26).

  ** The original “Bonnie Blue Flag” was a Confederate song written in 1861. Union versions developed in response. All the songs were full of fighting to the death and for justice and right.

  *** Loo is Mercy’s sister Louisa, born 1844. Lottie (Charlotte) and Ellen are Mercy’s cousins, the daughters of William and Mary Haine. Charlotte was nineteen years old, and Ellen fifteen. (Ellen died of tuberculosis just two years later, in 1866.) Frances Haine Hawkins, twenty-three years old, was an older sister of Charlotte and Ellen’s. She married Thomas Goddard Hawkins in 1863 and they were living with his parents at Farmington. Both Frances and her mother, Mary Haine, kept diaries, but there are none preserved of the Coles family’s visit in 1864. (Frances stopped writing diaries once she married in 1863, but continued again many years later.)

  **** Mary Dunkerton, who’d married Thomas Cook.

  ***** So much for the election! Abraham Lincoln was re-elected, winning 212 of the 233 Electoral College votes. Lincoln’s success in this election was attributed, in part, to General Sherman’s taking of Atlanta for the Union.

  Thirteen

  Going Home

  Thursday, November 10 to Thursday, November 17

  The 1860s was the age of awe, the age of enthrallment at what humankind could create, at what it could do. The world was on a fast-paced and heady journey of progress, from Farini’s and Blondin’s tightrope walks over Niagara Falls,* to Montreal’s Victoria Bridge, and from Notman’s new and brilliant photography, to Tom Thumb and Barnum’s “wonders” that “would take [Mercy] a week to think of it all,” she wrote.

  The 1860s were similar to the 1960s in their leap away from the past — not just a moving forward, but a way of life completely different from what had come before, from the way things used to be. Even the Civil War was considered “new.” Often referred to as the first “modern” war, with its new style of guns and bullets designed in the 1860s, its powerful artillery — th
e machinery that caused mass destruction of land and infrastructure — and the many killed, the war was fundamentally different in many ways from those that had been fought just a few decades previously.

  Here in Canada, political union and the forming of a real country was finally about to happen. The railway was creating a democracy of movement; travel was affordable, and much of the country, previously inaccess-ible, was now possible to journey through. The world was new. What a time to be young, what a time to start. Even if you were a still-youngish, still-unmarried woman.

  The Coles family began their return trip home on Thursday, November 10. Mercy Coles and her parents left their relatives and travelled onwards, touring through New York City and Boston before they began the final leg of the trip home. New York City was then as alluring and full of entertainment as we think of it today.

  All this was undertaken as the Civil War still raged. Sherman’s final destruction of Atlanta began on November 12, leaving the city a smoking ruin. New York City was nearly burned to the ground; one of the fires started next to a theatre on Broadway, where John Wilkes Booth was performing. People were enthralled with Tom Thumb and in awe of Broadway — no one seemed to have a worry or a care in the world, least of all any concern over the Civil War.

  Meanwhile, Mercy was hoping to see Leonard Tilley again, before it all ended, before her father became set against Confederation … before he went mad, before she became too old.

  But first —

  As they began their journey back to PEI, Mercy wrote that they had lunch in the eating saloon, “the first she was ever in,” at the train station, because her Uncle William wanted them to. By Mercy’s standards, this was unusual, and yet upper-class Feo Monck often ate at train stations. On October 6, 1864, Feo wrote, “The dinners you get at railway stations in Canada are so much better than what you get when you are travelling at home.” The food may have been good, but the travelling wasn’t. On her return trip from Niagara Falls, October 13, Feo wrote:

  None of the trains this side of the Atlantic connect, so we had to wait every now and then an hour, or more, and they are always after their time. I know nothing more irritating than travelling in this country — what with the trains missing “connection,” and the spitting and beastliness. We had a very good dinner at Hamilton — roast beef, potatoes and butter, cabbage, apple pie, beer and cheese. I give you our bill of fare to show how much more civilized the food is than what you get in civilized England, where you rush in at stations to get old and cold soup, and horrid sandwiches.

  Mercy and Feo also both travelled in sleeping cars. The famous Pullman sleeping car was released in April 1864, but neither Mercy’s nor Feo’s descriptions sound like they travelled in the new luxury cars. They both write similar accounts of their travel conditions, which speak of how accessible train travel was to all and sundry. Mercy writes that she and her mother were “first up” when they have a sleeping car, and thus they get the “clean towel.” On her trip back from Niagara Falls, Feo continues:

  At Toronto we “embarked aboard the sleeping cars” where they can’t spit much because there is matting, and they are not allowed. We were more comfortable than the others, as no one was allowed to sleep over us.… and then they [a newlywed couple] went to bed, and oh! that was a horrid sight. Off went the man’s coat, waistcoat, braces, and boots, and then they tucked themselves into bed. We had no curtains and only cloaks for bedclothes, so we were lucky; but these wretches tucked the curtains all round them. Ugh!

  On the way to New York, Mercy and her parents travelled through the new oil cities of Corry and Meadville, Pennsylvania. Oil was big, and there was quick money to be made — and lost. The brothers of John Wilkes Booth pleaded with him to stop his speculating for oil, to forget about politics, and return to his acting career with them. On November 25, less than two weeks after Mercy attended a performance at the Broadway theater, managed by Edwin Booth, the three Booth brothers, Edwin, John Wilkes, and Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., performed together for the first and only time, in a one-night performance of Julius Caesar, as a fundraiser for a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park.**

  Just an hour into the show, Confederates set fire to the city, including the house that adjoined the theatre. The theatre was packed, and the crowd began to panic. The New York Times reported the fires as “one of the most fiendish and inhuman acts known in modern times.” Edwin Booth, anticipating a chaotic mass exodus, stepped out of character — he was playing the role of Brutus — and calmed the crowd. In the end, the theatre was saved, and so was the city. It was only five months later that his brother John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

  General William T. Sherman of the Northern states, for Lincoln’s Union government, took Atlanta in September 1864. It was this event that helped Lincoln beat George McClellan in the election on November 8. Before Sherman left on his famous March to the Sea, he had Atlanta destroyed. On November 12, he ordered the business district ruined. Over the next few days, the city was razed. There are numerous eyewitness accounts, including his own, of how complete, and how terrible, it was. Sherman’s military secretary, Henry Hitchcock, who had only just joined Sherman’s forces the month before, wrote on November 15:

  Today the destruction fairly commenced.… First bursts of smoke, dense, black volumes, then tongues of flame, then huge waves of fire roll up into the sky: presently the skeletons of great warehouses stand out in relief against and amidst sheets of roaring, blazing, furious flames, — then the angry waves roll less high, and are of deeper color, then sink and cease, and only the fierce glow from the bare and blackened walls … as one fire sinks another rises, further along the horizon … it is a line of fire and smoke, lurid, angry, dreadful to look upon.

  Sherman, ever a general, gives an account that is a mixed bag of ruin and elation:

  About 7 a.m. of November 16th we rode out of Atlanta by the Decatur road, filled by the marching troops and wagons of the Fourteenth Corps; and reaching the hill, just outside of the old rebel works, we naturally paused to look back upon the scenes of our past battles. We stood upon the very ground whereon was fought the bloody battle of July 22d and could see the copse of wood where McPherson fell. Behind us lay Atlanta, smoldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in air and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.… Then we turned our horses’ heads to the east; Atlanta was soon lost behind the screen of trees, and became a thing of the past. Around it clings many a thought of desperate battle, of hope and fear, that now seem like the memory of a dream. The day was extremely beautiful, clear sunlight, with bracing air, and an unusual feeling of exhilaration seemed to pervade all minds — a feeling of something to come, vague and undefined, still full of venture and intense interest.

  On the ship from Boston to New Brunswick, on Tuesday, November 15, Mercy met a Mr. Solomon and his wife, who were fleeing Atlanta. Nothing about the meeting could possibly convey the horrors of the destruction of Atlanta — either Mercy’s writing, or the cavalier way Mr. Solomon behaved. One might guess why Mercy wrote in the fashion she did. As a youngish woman wanting to be wooed, hoping for romance, or at least a viable marriage, her job, her aim was to be bright and airy, the way she wanted life to be, as though life were nothing more than the pursuit of pleasure. But how different is that from today? It’s the prerogative of the young, this lighthearted look at life, regardless of the era.

  Mr. Solomon, of course, was behaving as a Southern gentleman would. It wouldn’t be right or proper to speak of the war in any real fashion with a young woman. Even though troops at the front were able to read the newspapers within two days of their publication, the war would not be commonplace or suitable for public discussion with women.

  In Saint John, at the hotel, on November 15, with Mr. Solomon, Mercy writes that they sang the “Bonnie Blue Flag” again. One can’t imagine this would be the Southern Confederate version, after just having come from her uncle’s.
Nor, presumably, would Mr. Solomon have been singing a Union song, although it is possible Mr. Solomon was a Union supporter, even though he was from the South. The aims of both the North and the South were viewed positively at different times in Prince Edward Island. Some Islanders were worried about what the North might do when the war ended, but there was sympathy for the South’s right to self-determination. George Coles had expressed support for the South, too, though that was in 1861. Thus, Mercy may have known both Union and Confederate versions of the song. Here, again, the Civil War plays foil to Mercy Coles’s trip away from home.

  Mercy Coles wasn’t concerned with writing for posterity. The importance of her writing stems from the fact that it was written in that exact moment in time, when the things she wrote about were in the process of happening, before they became important events of interest. And so, there is no purposeful excluding, or including, of information. Everything Mercy thought of importance or interest is here. History is usually dictated from the viewpoint of the victors — in this case, the men who had position and power. With Mercy Coles’s diary, we have the rare opportunity to look back through the eyes of a young, single woman at the events, the time, and the men of this pivotal point in the history of both Canada and the United States.

  The style and intent of the writer affect our reading of the material, of course. Knowing what we know now of the past, and of Mercy, she sometimes comes across as too blithe, too innocent. Mr. Solomon might have written of this episode differently, as would George Coles. Mercy’s intent may be to be cheery, light, but the fact that this is a diary, presumably meant for herself, and possibly her family’s enjoyment, too, means one expects more — more insight, more knowledge, more understanding. Mercy has proven to be a keen observer of people and their behaviour. Again, one wishes Mercy would speak directly to the times, the women, the men, and about herself. She has given us a great glimpse of what she could tell us. George Brown’s assessment of Mercy and her sisters makes us believe there is more to Mercy than what we have here, near the end of her journey. Really, we want more, because we know there is more.