CHARLESTON

Tea and Angst

SATURDAY, APRIL 13

IN CHARLESTON ON SATURDAY, ANXIETY MADE ROUTINE ACTS impossible to perform. The weather at least had improved. The heavy rain of the morning gave way to brilliant sun, which suffused the city and lit the face of the Mills House hotel and dropped long black bars of shadow across Meeting Street. The cannon fire and shell bursts from across the bay increased in frequency as if some new battle had begun. It had nothing to do with an attack by the Union fleet. The ships remained quiescent, swaying off the bar, their ineffectual colors rippling in the wind. Cowards, or so the spectators on rooftops deemed them—staying in place even though Fort Sumter, their treasured fort, was on fire.

The night before there had been a period of jubilant relief when word arrived that no one in the Confederate batteries had been injured. “Nobody hurt after all,” Mary wrote. “How gay we were last night.” Beauregard’s guns also had come through unscathed. “Not even a battery the worse for wear,” Mary wrote. “So the aides—still with swords and red sashes by way of uniform—tell us.” James Chesnut had returned by now after helping deliver Beauregard’s ultimatum, with saber and sash intact—these, Mary confided, having been given to him by another lodger in their boarding house “who rummaged” them, Mary wrote, “from somewhere.”

But Mary and the other wives at Mrs. Gidiere’s could not relax. Now it was Saturday, and heavy firing had resumed—the heaviest firing yet. Enslaved Blacks served breakfast in the dining room; the cheery scent of coffee and baked goods filtered through the halls. “But the sound of those guns makes regular meals impossible,” Mary wrote. “None of us go to table. But tea trays pervade the corridors, going everywhere.”

The stress affected each of the women differently. “Some of the anxious hearts lie on their beds and moan in solitary misery,” Mary observed. “Mrs. Wigfall and I solace ourselves with tea in my room.”

Many prayed. “These women have all a satisfying faith,” Mary wrote. “‘God is on our side,’ they cry.” But when Mary and Mrs. Wigfall were alone with their tea, they asked each other why God would be on their side. “We are told, ‘Of course He hates the Yankees.’”

A friend of Mary’s, Louisa Hamilton—“Lou”—came to the boarding house, which had become, as Mary put it, “a sort of news center.” Louisa’s husband, Jack Randolph Hamilton, had designed the floating battery, and she could not stop talking about it. To divert her, Mary asked about her new son, of whom Louisa was equally proud, for her prior marriage had yielded no children. Mary asked if the boy could talk yet.

“No—” Louisa said, “—not exactly.” But he did imitate one of the especially loud cannon, she said. “When he hears that, he claps his hands and cries ‘Boom boom.’”

Mary marveled at the calm of the Black servants in the house. Some were employees hired out by their owners, each wearing the required badge. Other enslaved servants were brought along by the families lodged within. “Not by one word or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these negro servants,” Mary wrote. “Laurence”—her husband’s enslaved valet—“sits at our door, as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent. So are they all. They carry it too far. You could not tell that they hear even the awful row that is going on in the bay, though it is dinning in their ears night and day. And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. And they make no sign. Are they solidly stupid or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?”

A tray of tea and toast arrived, Mary noted in her diary. “Also came Colonel Manning, A.D.C. [Aide de Camp]—red sash and sword—to announce that he has been under fire and didn’t mind.”

In fact, Manning was quite proud of his performance and wanted to be sure that Mary, his flirtation, knew of it. “It is one of those things,” he told the women: “A fellow never knows how he will come out of it until he is tried.”