Refugitta of Richmond RefugittaThe Wartime Recollections, of Richmond Grave and Gay, of Constance Cary Harrison Edited by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and S. Kittrell Rushing The University of Tennessee Press • Knoxville a Copyright © 2011 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville. All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. First Edition. Originally published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harrison, Burton, Mrs., 1843–1920. Refugitta of Richmond: the wartime recollections, grave and gay, of Constance Cary Harrison / edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and S. Kittrell Rushing. — 1st ed. p. cm. Originally published under title: Recollections grave and gay. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN-13: 978-1-57233-792-3 eISBN-10: 1-57233-792-3 1. Harrison, Burton, Mrs., 1843–1920. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives, Confederate. 3. Virginia—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives, Confederate. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Women. 5. Virginia—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Women. 6. Richmond (Va.)—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. I. Hughes, Nathaniel Cheairs. II. Rushing, S. Kittrell. III. Harrison, Burton, Mrs., 1843-1920 Recollections grave and gay. IV. Title. E487.H312 2011 973.7'82—dc22 20100300 Contents Preface ............................................. ix Acknowledgments .....................................xiii Introduction ......................................... xv Refugitta of Richmond ................................... 1 Chapter 1 ............................................ 5 Chapter 2 ........................................... 17 Chapter 3 ........................................... 31 Chapter 4 ........................................... 47 Chapter 5 ........................................... 59 Chapter 6 ........................................... 79 Chapter 7 ........................................... 93 Chapter 8 .......................................... 113 Chapter 9 .......................................... 143 Chapter 10 ......................................... 153 Chapter 11 ......................................... 173 Epilogue ........................................... 197 Appendix: Burton Norvell Harrison ....................... 203 Notes ............................................. 211 Bibliography ........................................ 235 Index ............................................. 239 Illustrations Following Page 131 Constance Cary Harrison, ca. 1885 Constance Cary Harrison, ca. 1880 Burton Harrison, 1855 General P. G. T. Beauregard, Carte de Visite, ca. 1862–63 Burton Norvell Harrison, His Nephew Caskie Harrison, and Caskie’s Younger Brother B. F. Eshleman, Washington Artillery Burton Harrison as a University of Mississippi Faculty Member, ca. 1859–60 Office of Burton Harrison, Private Secretary to President Davis Jefferson Davis’s Home, the White House of the Confederacy, ca. 1865 Jefferson Davis’s Home, the White House of the Confederacy, 2008 The Reverend Charles Frederic Minnegerode Lucius Q. C. Lamar, Ethics and Law Professor, University of Mississippi Brigadier General John Pegram of Richmond Hetty Cary Pegram Martin CSS Patrick Henry Constance Cary and Herbert Norris en Route to Visit Burton Harrison at Fort Delaware, 1866 St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Richmond, Virginia St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 2008 Jefferson Davis and Mrs. Davis, after his Release from Prison, ca. 1867 Envelope Address: “General Constance Cary, Commanding Department of Richmond, H.” Trial of Jefferson Davis, May 13, 1867 Balcony from Which Five-year-old Joe Davis Fell to His Death, April 30, 1864 Sanctuary of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Richmond, Virginia, as It Appeared during the Civil War and prior to 1889 Interior of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 2008 Preface IN the fall of 2008, during our preparation of Constance Cary Harrison’s wartime memoir, almost fifty thousand Civil War reenactors, historians, and history buffs gathered just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to remember and to recreate as best they could the 1863 three-day battle of Chickamauga. Vice President Dick Cheney was on hand to make a pre- sentation to the National Chickamauga Battlefield Park commemorating the service of his great-grandfather, Lt. Samuel Fletcher Cheney of the Twenty-first Ohio Infantry. The vice president was joined by reenactors and observers from a number of states and several foreign countries in recognizing the 145th anniversary of the battle in which as many as four thousand men died and almost twenty-five thousand were wounded. When asked why the vice president of the United States attended, one reenac- tor answered, “He is here to honor his ancestor just like us dressed blue and gray are honoring our ancestors.”1 Later, expressing motives similar to those of the vice president, thousands of men and women, many carry ing the weight of twenty-first-century eating habits and huffing the gasps of sedentary middle-agers, put on wool clothes and hauled facsimile nineteenth-century war equipment onto the sun-scorched reenactment field. Many of the reenactors said they lived history in the present by attempt- ing to re-create the events and memories of the past. One told a newspaper reporter, “I’d been pessimistic about the whole idea because I thought it was a little dorky and kind of strange that people would do it, but what I have learned is that the passion for history is the main reason people do this.”2 Is recreating history really possible? The reality is no matter how sin- cere the desire, no matter how dedicated the seeker, no matter the depth of a devotee’s knowledge, experiencing history as a first-person witness is impossible. Eyewitness is only for those who were there, part of the past— actual participants, not re-creators or reenactors. People of the twenty-first x century may feel close to those of the nineteenth through activities such as those on the Chickamauga Battlefield—close, but not real. Nevertheless, the desire and passion of those in the twenty-first century to know and to learn from those who lived in the nineteenth, to experience the emo- tions that motivated the past, make historical research and reenacting valu- able. And realistically, one relies for a better understanding of the past on the records left by those who were there, the testimony of first-person experience. “Whereof what’s past is prologue.”3 Our knowledge of the past, our awareness of the attitudes and values and beliefs of those who set the stage for our present, help us understand who and what we are. Awareness of the prologue enriches the present—which is, after all, but a prologue to the future. There are hundreds upon hundreds of first-person accounts of Civil War life. Most of these accounts, however, are the witness of men. Relatively few reports from women exist in our canon of Civil War memoirs. Among the best are Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut’s Diary from Dixie,4 Eliza Frances Andrews’s Wartime Journal of a Georgia Girl: 1864–1865,5 and Constance Cary Harrison’s Recollections Grave and Gay. Each is a well-written, per- sonal narrative of day-to-day experiences and reactions to worlds turning upside down. Each is a narrative from the point of view of a privileged southern woman. Each writer was well educated, each was a keen observer, each wrote visually and emotionally, and after the war, each woman used her wartime diary to develop the memoir for which she became known. Both A Diary from Dixie and Wartime Journal of a Georgia Girl have been republished in recent years—Chesnut’s diary in 1997, the Andrews diary in 1960, 1976, and again in 1997. However, until this current project, Constance Cary Harrison’s Recollections Grave and Gay has been avail- able only through searches of antique and used book collections, Kessinger Publishing’s rare reprint project,6 and on line through the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South Web site.7 Both the Kessinger reprint and the UNC on-line version of Recollections are repro- ductions of Harrison’s original 1911 publication. Neither Kessinger nor UNC, however, provide supplemental material to place the memoir in his- torical context or to identify major historical figures in the text. Harrison’s memories of the war are too valuable, too well expressed, and too important to remain in history’s closet. Harrison’s memories, as she expressed them, must be heard as much as possible in the context of the nineteenth century. To the early-twenty- first-century reader, socialized and acculturated in the last half of the twen- Preface xi tieth, the apparent snobbishness and name-dropping in Constance Cary Harrison’s description of her life in Richmond and later in New York soci- ety may seem off-putting. But keep in mind the warning, “It’s not what a person actually says, it’s what people hear!”8 The tone of Harrison’s mem- oir, what we hear with our twenty-first-century sensibilities, may not be the real message intended by this woman of the nineteenth-century South. There’s a scene in Absence of Malice, the 1981 Paul Newman and Sally Field movie, in which Sally Field’s character, Megan Carter, sits in a park talking with the vice principal of a Catholic school, Teresa Perrone.9 The newspaper reporter is a “modern woman,” at least by 1981 measures. Megan Carter is “liberated.” Teresa Perrone, by Meg’s standards, is of an- other world.