A glance at the handwriting gave me to know it was from my father. I soon came to a pause in the school path: for my father wrote that my brothers were preparing to start for Richmond, Virginia, as soldiers of our new formed Southern Confederacy. As he wished to have all his children united under his roof, before the boys went away, my father earnestly desired me to ask leave of absence for a few days, so that I might join the home circle also.
The suspending of the school was easily arranged, and I was soon at home assisting in preparing my brothers for military service, little dreaming they were about to enter into a four-years’ conflict!
But oh, how clearly even now I read every milestone of that convulsed period, as I look back upon it after a quarter of a century! Our soldiers, in their new gray uniforms, all aglow with fiery patriotism, fearing ere they should join battle that the last booming cannon would have ceased to reverberate among the mountains, hills, and valleys of “Old Virginia.” The blue cockades streaming in the wind, while Southern songs, inspirations of the moment, were heard on all sides: “We conquer or die,” and “Farewell to Brother Jonathan,” leading with fervent ardor.
While the war was in progress, it so happened that I was far removed from the seaboard and border States, in southern Alabama, where our people, encompassed and blockaded by the Federal forces, were most sadly straitened and distressed. It is of the exigencies of that stormy day, as hydra-headed they rose to view, that I have to write; of the many expedients to which we were reduced on our ever-narrowing territory, daily growing not only smaller, but less and less adequate for the sustenance of ourselves, our soldiers, and the Northern prisoners who were cast upon us by the fortunes of war.
Blame us not too severely, you who fought on the Union side; we, too, loved the Union our great and good Washington bequeathed us: with what deep devotion God knoweth. But, as Satan sagely remarks in the Book of Job, “all that a man hath will he give for his life.” Also a writer of profane history has truly said that “a man’s family is the nearest piece of his country, and the dearest one.” Need there be any wonder that, when a political party, with no love in its heart for the Southern white people, came into power, a party which we believed felt that the people of the South were fit only for the pikes hidden at Harper’s Ferry, we should have cried out, “What part have we in David? to your tents, O Israel.” It is cheering to know that our deeds and intentions have one great Judge, who will say, “Neither do I condemn thee.”