Queen of the Confederacy: The Innocent Deceits of Lucy Holcombe Pickens

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: “Out of the dead, cold ashes, life again.” John Bannister Tabb (1865–1869)

165 1863–1865 E arly in February of 1865, Union soldiers left Augusta, Georgia and headed to Columbia, South Carolina. Their route took them close to Edgefield and talk ran high of plundering the ex-governor’s plantation. It was rumored that Francis had vanished into the dim unknown of the interior.2 He may have gone to his sister’s plantation in Alabama. It is not known if Lucy went with him. She may have been in Marshall or, with characteristic self-assurance, she may have stayed at Edgewood. Confederate Major General Daniel Harvey Hill learned of the Union’s advance toward Edgefield and sent word from Augusta to Major N. W. Smith, chief inspector of field transportation. “Place 1,000 or 1,500 men on the Edgefield plank road, about 10 miles from the city, to guard approach in that direction.”3 General Wade Hampton and his cavalry unit were posted to guard the roads leading to the neighboring plantations. Hampton, considering the Union’s force, CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 1865–1869 “Out of the dead, cold ashes, life again.” John Bannister Tabb 166 Out of the dead, cold ashes urged Major General Joseph Wheeler, CSA, to move his troops at once to Columbia. This mass movement of Wheeler’s troops toward the Congaree River and Columbia did not go unnoticed by the Yankees . Union officers immediately ordered their troops to turn off the road leading to Edgefield and proceed post-haste to Columbia.4 No doubt there was grumbling among those Yankee soldiers who had looked forward to plundering the home of the ex-governor. On 16 February 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army shelled Columbia mercilessly. The Confederate forces, though badly out-numbered and out-maneuvered, met the attack with brave but ineffective resistance. A day later, the city fell to the Union. By eleven o’clock that morning, the colors of the 13th Iowa were flying over the Capitol building.5 Union soldiers tore through the city with triumphant abandon. They set many buildings on fire after plundering the interiors. Nothing was sacred. The unfinished State House was emptied of its contents including papers, letters, and mementos belonging to Lucy and to Francis. Much was lost to greed or to flames. Soldiers and stragglers, drunk and disorderly, destroyed or stole whatever met their fancy. Burned-out buildings left families without shelter. Evidence of Union destruction was everywhere as the Yankee forces combed a path nearly thirty miles wide through South Carolina. Miraculously, the sprawling plantation of Edgewood escaped. Its remoteness perhaps assured its salvation. Other plantation owners were not as fortunate . In many cases homes were pillaged, supplies and stores depleted and the owners’ wealth disappeared along with their slaves. The Union army headed northward trailed by hundreds of jubilant slaves.6 The news of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, in April of 1865, provoked varied feelings of relief, bitterness, and exhaustion. The long, hard struggle had ended. Now the South faced a bleak and uncertain future. Discouraged and sick, the Southern soldier made his way home to face a different and very difficult future. Many would find their homes destroyed and families marked by illness and starvation. The South, depleted of its manpower and slave work force, lay in ruin. 167 1865–1869 At first, the Reconstruction measures as set forth by President Andrew Johnson in 1865, followed Lincoln’s lenient policy toward the South.7 Johnson appointed provisional governors to the Southern states of Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and the Carolinas. Judge Benjamin F. Perry would serve as provisional governor of South Carolina.8 The slave was now a free man who worked by contract, was entitled to wages and, in some cases, was supplied with food, housing, and promised a share of the crop. Many Southerners, finding their age-old positions reversed, would not accept these conditions and, most certainly, many balked at any suggestion of suffrage for the Black man. The freed slave, however, anticipated “a better time coming” and the division of land—the proverbial “forty acres and a mule.”9 When this did not happen some refused to work and were thrown in jail by the Federal authorities. Disorder and violence flourished and offenses to both Black and White were “so varied and so numerous as to defy classification”10 and all under the ruse of self-defense. In...