November 19, 1864---A Woman's Wartime Journal

NOVEMBER 19, 1864:                

Dolly Sumner Lunt, the author of A Woman’s Wartime Journal, was a native of Massachusetts. Mrs. Lunt was a planter’s wife in Georgia during Sherman’s March To The Sea. Her husband was off fighting in the Confederate Army when Sherman’s main column came through and despoiled her plantation, Burge House.

Dolly’s diary entry for this day clearly expresses the horrors that typical Georgians experienced during the March.  Of particular note are Dolly’s comments regarding the taking of her “boys” (her slaves), the clear sorrow she felt, and the fear they felt as they were forcibly emancipated.  Mrs. Lunt’s comments about the slaves are notably patronizing, but they are not cruel, nor dismissive.  

Dolly Sumner Lunt’s home was spared from total destruction since the Yankee officer in charge of the raid turned out to be a friend of her brother: 

Slept in my clothes last night, as I heard that the Yankees went to  . . . Montgomery's on Thursday night . . .  searched his house, drank his wine, and took his money and valuables.  [T]he Yankees went to . . . Perry's . . . plundered his house, and drove off all his stock . . . I saw some blue-coats coming down the hill. [Perry] immediately raised his gun, swearing he would kill them anyhow.

"No, don't!" said I, and ran home as fast as I could . . .

I could hear them cry, "Halt! Halt!" and their guns went off in quick succession. Oh God, the time of trial has come!

I walked to the gate. There they came filing up . . . I hastened back to my frightened servants and told them that they had better hide  . . . like demons [the Yankees] rush in! My yards are full. To my smoke-house, my dairy, pantry, kitchen, and cellar, like famished wolves they come, breaking locks and whatever is in their way. The thousand pounds of meat in my smoke-house is gone in a twinkling, my flour, my meat, my lard, butter, eggs, pickles of various kinds --- both in vinegar and brine --- wine, jars, and jugs are all gone. My eighteen fat turkeys, my hens, chickens, and fowls, my young pigs, are shot down in my yard and hunted as if they were rebels themselves. Utterly powerless I ran out and appealed to the guard.

"I cannot help you, Madam; it is orders."

As I stood there . . .  I saw driven . . .  old Dutch, my dear old buggy horse . . . then came old Mary, my brood mare . . . with her three-year-old colt, my two-year-old mule, and her last little baby colt. There they go! There go my mules, my sheep, and, worse than all, my boys [slaves]!

Alas! little did I think while trying to save my house from plunder and fire that they were forcing my boys from home at the point of the bayonet .  . . Jack came crying to me, the big tears coursing down his cheeks, saying they were making him go. I said:

"Stay in my room."

But a man followed in, cursing him and threatening to shoot him if he did not go . . . I had not believed they would force from their homes the poor, doomed negroes, but such has been the fact here, cursing them and saying that "Jeff Davis wanted to put them in his army, but that they should not fight for him, but for the Union." No! Indeed no! They are not friends to the slave. We have never made the poor, cowardly negro fight, and it is strange, passing strange, that the all-powerful Yankee nation with the whole world to back them, their ports open, their armies filled with soldiers from all nations, should at last take the poor negro to help them out against this little Confederacy which was to have been brought back into the Union in sixty days' time!

My poor boys! My poor boys ! What unknown trials are before you! How you have clung to your mistress and assisted her in every way you knew.

Never have I corrected them; a word was sufficient. Never have they known want of any kind. Their parents are with me, and how sadly they lament the loss of their boys. Their cabins are rifled of every valuable, the soldiers swearing that their Sunday clothes were the white people's, and that they never had money to get such things  as they had. Poor Frank's chest was broken open, his money and tobacco taken. He has always been a money-making and saving boy; not infrequently has his crop brought him five hundred dollars and more . . .

A Captain Webber from Illinois came into my house. Of him I claimed protection from the vandals who were forcing themselves into my room. He said that he knew my brother Orrington. At that name I could not restrain my feelings, but, bursting into tears, implored him to see my brother and let him know my destitution. I saw nothing before me but starvation. He promised to do this, and comforted me with the assurance that my dwelling-house would not be burned . . . Poor little Sadai went crying to him as to a friend and told him that they had taken her doll, Nancy [The doll was found and was returned to the little girl. Her children later played with it, and it is now the plaything of her granddaughter.] . . . I parted as with a friend.

Sherman himself and a greater portion of his army passed my house that day . . .  desolating my home --- wantonly doing it when there was no necessity for it.

Such a day, if I live to the age of Methuselah, may God spare me from ever seeing again!

My Heavenly Father alone saved me from the destructive fire. Shall I ever forget the deliverance?

To-night I could not close my eyes . . . watching the fires in the distance and dreading the approaching day, which, I feared . . . would be but a continuation of horrors.

Lunt’s diary is a fascinating document, in many ways an encapsulation of the contradictions that bedeviled the Confederacy. Lunt refers to “this little Confederacy” as the victim of the mighty Union, and as her slaves --- her “boys” --- as unwilling “cowardly,” “crying,” “doomed” victims of the Union soldiers sent to free them. We are given a heartbreaking portrait of the dissolution of a relationship between Mistress and slave that is almost analogous to the treatment accorded one’s pets. Lunt points out that her “boys” are taken off by force but that their parents remain behind. We do not know however if this is the treatment accorded to all her “servants.” We also do not know if she bewailed the fate of all her slaves or only favored ones. And we do not know if any of her “boys” decided to go off with Sherman’s men on their own.

All in all, this passage underscores the shambolic nature of American antebellum slavery, a condition in which the slave was seen only as property in the strictest Jeffersonian sense. Completely unregulated except in the negative (slaves could not be educated, could not travel without passes, and had no inherent inalienable rights), “the peculiar institution” of the South was in many ways the worst expression of human bondage ever seen. Slaves could be (and often were) sold away from their families. They were routinely branded, often beaten, frequently whipped. President Theodore Roosevelt told the tale of his mother Mittie Bulloch’s prewar “shadow”, Toy, both playmate and servant, and how Mittie’s older brother killed his own “shadow” in a fit of pique to much regret but no serious consequences (this same brother later killed a man in a duel, another steadfast Southern tradition).  

Slaves who ran off were given no hearing; they were forcibly, often violently, returned to their owners. Slave women were, without recourse, subject to the sexual attentions of Masters and other white males on the plantations. If Simon Legree of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a caricature of the wicked slaveowner, it was much a matter of degree. An enlightened Master (like Jefferson Davis) might punish wrongs committed by slaves on his property via the mechanism of an in-house slave-run court system, but this was not the norm, and there was no State or interstate system that gave any even de minimus legal protection to blacks. The classical Greek idea of having a slave tutor an owner’s children in the Homeric epics was beyond comprehension to even the most enlightened Southern slaveowner, as much as was the idea of an offer of manumission every seven years (and mandatory manumission every fifty years) that was enshrined in the laws of ancient Israel.